When is the Cold Food Festival?

The Cold Food Festival falls one or two days before the Qingming Festival in the Gregorian calendar each year.

Cold Food Festival, a traditional Chinese festival, is held on the 105th day after the winter solstice in the summer calendar, one or two days before the Qingming Festival. It is the first day of the festival, the ban on fireworks, only eat cold food, and in the development of later generations gradually increased the cleaning, trekking, swing, cuju, pull hooks, cockfighting and other customs. Cold Food Festival stretches before and after more than two thousand years, once known as the first Chinese folk festival day, Cold Food Festival is the only traditional Han Chinese festival named after the food customs.

From the Spring and Autumn Period to the present, the Cold Food Festival has a history of more than 2,600 years. Along with the passage of years, the Cold Food Festival has quietly integrated into the Qingming Festival. The people's praise for loyalty, honesty and clarity represented by the Cold Food is the same as it has been for thousands of years.

Festival Characteristics

The Cold Food Festival is also known as the "One Hundred and Fifty Days", which is due to the fact that it falls on the 105th day after the winter solstice. In the Song Dynasty, Su Zhe's poem "New Fire" reads: "Yesterday was one hundred and five days, and the old and the young had cold food", and in the Song Dynasty, Mei Yaochen's poem "The Cold Food Festival in the Traveling Party of Li Sheren in accordance with the rhyme" reads: "One hundred and five days of wind and rain are rapid, and the clothes of the spring countryside are wet in the diagonal drift". The fire ban on cold food extinguished the fire that had been preserved during the winter, and at the time of the Qingming Festival, it was necessary to drill wood for fire again.

The cold food festival period of worship sweeping exhibition tomb, smoking ban, ancestor worship, cold food, willow, trekking, cuju, tree planting, swing, flower viewing, cockfighting, feed the feast, chanting and other customs, as well as giving feasts, flower viewing, cockfighting, chicken, skeleton chicken, pulling hooks (tug-of-war), drilling fire, kite-flying, fight the hundred grasses, thrown (tiles and stoneware toys), and so on, and many other activities, greatly enriched the social life of ancient China.

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia - Cold Food Festival