Cold Food Festival and its relationship to Qingming
Hanshi and Qingming
Hanshi (寒食) means Cold Food. Its characteristic practice was a temporary restriction on making fire, which required food to be prepared beforehand or eaten without fresh cooking. It became closely associated with the spring season of outings and ancestral remembrance. Qingming names both a solar term and a festival, while Hanshi is an adjoining observance with its own history.
The timing and duration of Cold Food changed over time. Zong Lin’s sixth-century Jingchu Suishi Ji, an account of seasonal customs in the middle Yangtze region, places it 105 days after the winter solstice and describes three days without fire. The commentary transmitted with the text discusses other reckonings. In the Northern Song capital, preparations, Cold Food and Qingming formed a connected festival period.
| Historical account | Description of the festival period |
|---|---|
| Jingchu Suishi Ji | Cold Food counted from the winter solstice, with a three-day fire restriction |
| Dongjing Menghua Lu, volume 7 | A food-preparation day before Cold Food; Qingming identified as the third festival day, with grave visits and excursions |
The close spacing of these occasions helped bring their customs together. Grave visits, spring outings and prepared foods became part of a shared season, while the fire restriction lost its former prominence. A modern calendar may mark Hanshi on the day before Qingming, but that single-day label does not describe every historical observance.
The Jie Zitui story
The best-known explanatory legend concerns Jie Zitui, a follower of the future Duke Wen of Jin. In its familiar later form, Jie withdraws to a mountain with his mother. A fire intended to force him out kills him instead, and the ruler institutes a prohibition on fire in remorse. The story makes loyalty, withdrawal from public life and belated remembrance central to the festival.
The earlier account in the Zuo Zhuan differs. Jie rejects the scramble for rewards after the ruler’s return to power, withdraws with his mother and dies in seclusion. Unable to find him, the ruler assigns Mianshang as a memorial to Jie’s virtue and his own failure. This version contains no mountain fire. The later legend of a death by burning therefore needs to be distinguished from the earlier story of withdrawal.
Foods prepared for the season
Avoiding fresh cooking made advance preparation important. Food had to carry a household through the fireless period, and festival markets supplied special foods as well as everyday provisions. In the Northern Song capital, cakes and dairy foods were sold during the season. Flour figures shaped like swallows were also made and strung on willow branches before Cold Food.
Qingtuan, green glutinous-rice cakes, remain associated with the wider Qingming food season. Their colour and flavour can come from mugwort mixed into the dough. Making and sharing these seasonal cakes continues even where a household no longer observes a prohibition on fire.