Qingming‑Guo Craft

As the Qingming Festival is coming, a popular seasonal snack is returning to the table. This time, people use their creative hands to turn it into lovely, eye-catching works. These works are almost too beautiful to eat.

Wang Lijuan works in a small food workshop in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province. She is an inheritor(继承人) of the traditional craft(手艺) of making Qingming Guo. It is a seasonal snack made from rice mixed with mugwort(艾叶).

Wang Lijuan and her workmates are busy making lots of green dumplings at the workshop. They need to work fast to deal with the many orders they receive. Each one carries the smell of spring, and the warmth of this ancient craft.

Wang has brought new ideas to the craft. She uses something natural to colour and give the dough(面团)a nice taste. She does not use man-made additives(添加剂), so all colours come from nature.

The dumplings are then carefully shaped by hand into nice shapes of spring, like flowers and small birds. They turn the simple dumplings into something that looks like edible art.