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Chinese people celebrate the Laba Festival in Nanjing by sharing Laba rice porridge. [Shao Dan / For China Daily]
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Eating rich and colorful congee of many ingredients is a tradition on the La Ba Festival.
The festival was originally a day of thanks for a good harvest and sacrifice to ancestors. It also marks the day on which Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, reached enlightenment and became immortal.
The La Ba festival is celebrated on the eighth (ba 八) day of the 12th and the last lunar month (la yue 腊月) and is one of the most important traditional festivals in Chinese culture. It is also a prelude to the Chinese Lunar New Year.
The congee (la ba zhou 腊八粥) typically contains a minimum of eight ingredients and as many as 18, including rice, red beans, jujube, lily root, lotus seeds, walnuts, peanuts, green beans, gouqi (wolfberry 枸杞), pearl barley and millet. It’s sweetened with sugar or seasoned with salt.
On this day in the past, many Chinese families would butcher pigs and sheep, salt preserved fish and ham, buy nian huo (New Year’s goods 年货) and, of course, cook la ba zhou and share it with neighbors and relatives.
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People enjoy free rice porridge at the Lama Temple, Beijing, on Jan 19, 2013. The the Lama Temple is a Tibetan Buddhist temple, which has a tradition of serving free laba rice porridge on the eighth day of December on the Chinese lunar calendar. It is a tradition in China to eat porridge on this day. The main ingredients are rice and sticky rice; people also add sugar, red dates, lotus seeds, walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, longans, hazelnuts, raisins, red beans, peanuts, and other foods to make the porridge special. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]
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In some rural areas, people still spread la ba congee on doors, fences and wood stacks as a sacrifice to the God of Grains.
The Chinese character la also can mean the transition from old to new, hunting for sacrificial offerings, dispelling disease and welcoming the new spring.
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