Customs of Dragon Boat Festival in Shandong Province

Speaking of the eating custom of the Dragon Boat Festival, we can't omit zongzi, which has a history of thousands of years. Shandong people love to wrap zongzi with glutinous rice or yellow rice, and there are many fillings, but the most traditional one is yellow glutinous rice with dates, which are wrapped in reed leaves into triangles, commonly known as "jujube zongzi". In Yimeng mountain area and Rizhao area of Linyi, a kind of Bole leaf wrapped zongzi is often used on the hillside.

In addition to zongzi, a special food of the Dragon Boat Festival, there are also customs of eating mugwort leaves and boiling eggs during the Dragon Boat Festival in all parts of Shandong. In the early morning of Dragon Boat Festival, a family put fresh wormwood in a pot to boil eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the skin of the eggs turns slightly green and has a faint smell of wormwood.

Drinking in blue barrels is a custom in Jinan. Picking fresh lotus leaves that have just emerged from the water to hold wine, piercing the heart of the leaves to make them communicate with the stems, and then sucking wine from the stems, people drink lotus stems, and the wine flows into the mouth, becoming a summer drink during the Dragon Boat Festival and even in hot summer days.

According to historical records, in ancient times, when the lotus flowers in Daming Lake were in full bloom, some officials and scholars often went to the lake for the summer. They cut the lotus leaves in the lake, filled them with wine, and stabbed them in the center with hairpins to make them communicate with the hollow lotus stems. Drinking from the end of the lotus stem, "the smell of wine is mixed with lotus fragrance, and the fragrance is better than water cooling."