Tangyuan, also known as Yuanxiao, is celebrated on the 15th day of the first lunar month every year, just after the Spring Festival, and is a traditional festival in China-Lantern Festival.
The first month is the first month of the lunar calendar. The ancients called the night "Xiao", so they called the fifteenth day of the first month the Lantern Festival. The fifteenth day of the first month is the night of the first full moon in a year and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. On the night of Spring Festival, people celebrate this festival and the continuation of the Spring Festival. Lantern Festival is also called "Shangyuan Festival".
According to the folk tradition in China, on this bright night, people light thousands of lanterns to celebrate. Going out to enjoy the moon, lighting and setting fires, enjoying lantern riddles, eating Yuanxiao, family reunion and celebrating festivals are all enjoyment.
Folk custom of eating Yuanxiao on Lantern Festival. Yuanxiao is made of glutinous rice, which can be solid or stuffed. Filled with bean paste, sugar, hawthorn, various fruit materials and so on. You can cook, fry, steam and fry when you eat. At first, people called this kind of food "Floating Zi Yuan", and later they called it "Tangtuan" or "Tangyuan". These names are similar in pronunciation, meaning reunion, symbolizing family reunion, harmony and happiness. People also miss their departed relatives and place their best wishes on their future lives.
In some places, the Lantern Festival also has the custom of "walking away from all diseases", which is also called "roasting all diseases" and "dispersing all diseases". Most of the participants are women. They walk together or against the wall, or across the bridge in the suburbs, in order to drive away diseases and eliminate disasters.
With the passage of time, there are more and more activities in the Lantern Festival, and many local festivals have added traditional folk performances such as playing dragon lanterns, playing lions, walking on stilts, rowing dry boats, dancing yangko and playing Taiping drums. This traditional festival, which has been passed down for more than two thousand years, is not only popular on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but also celebrated every year in areas where overseas Chinese live in concentrated communities.
Eating Yuanxiao on the fifteenth day of the first month, as a kind of food, has a long history in China. In the Song Dynasty, a novel Lantern Festival food was popular among the people. This kind of food was originally called "Floating Zi Yuan", later called "Yuanxiao", and merchants also called it "Yuanbao". Yuanxiao, or "Tangyuan", contains sugar, roses, sesame seeds, red bean paste, cinnamon bark, walnut kernel, nuts, jujube paste and so on. And wrapped in glutinous rice flour into a circle, you can be vegetarian and have different flavors. It can be boiled, fried and steamed, which means happy reunion. Jiaozi, Shaanxi is not wrapped, but "rolled" in glutinous rice flour, or boiled or fried, warm and round.