Qingtuan

01

A green dumpling for Qingming

Qingtuan are dumplings of green glutinous rice dough, filled and steamed, that usually appear in the weeks before Qingming.

The dough is glutinous rice flour worked with the juice or purée of a green spring plant, which gives it its color and a light grassy, herbal smell. It is wrapped around a filling, rolled into a ball and steamed. The skin is soft, chewy and slightly springy; anyone who has eaten Japanese mochi, and especially yomogi mochi, made with the same mugwort, will find it close kin. The classic filling is smooth red bean paste, mildly sweet.

Qingtuan are a food of the season, not of the year. They are sold for only a few weeks, usually in the run-up to Qingming, the festival in early April when families visit their ancestors’ graves, and they once went on the table as an offering. Today they are mostly eaten simply because it is spring.

They belong to Jiangnan, the lower Yangtze. In Shanghai the name is qingtuan, “green dumpling”; in Ningbo and Jinhua, in Zhejiang province, the same thing is called qingmingguo, 清明粿, “Qingming cake.” Fillings have multiplied: alongside red bean paste, Shanghai now eats savory qingtuan of salted egg yolk with pork floss, or diced pork with spring bamboo shoots. The photograph on this page shows the salted egg yolk and pork floss kind, one whole and one cut in half: a shiny, bright green skin around a dense, savory filling flecked with sesame.

Sources [3][4][8][9]

02

Where the green comes from

Mugwort is the best-known plant, but not the only one.

Some cooks use mugwort, 艾草; some use jiangmai grass, 浆麦草; others the juice of another green vegetable, pounded together with the glutinous rice flour. In Shanghai the shops talk about smell as much as color: Xinghualou’s qingtuan come out of the steamer with a strong young-wheat fragrance, while Wangjiasha’s best seller is made with mugwort. In Jinhua, cudweed, 鼠麴草, which grows along the local rivers, is used more often than mugwort, and gives the cakes a different color and texture.

Keeping the green bright takes work. One traditional method soaks the mugwort in lime water, boils it in a copper pot and presses out the juice; in Ningbo a pinch of baking soda goes into the pot while it boils. Home cooks blanch the leaves for thirty seconds in salted water, plunge them into iced water and use the purée quickly: left standing, it turns the dough a duller green.

The plants were chosen for more than color. Mugwort and other wild herbs were traditionally believed to keep away insects and the ailments of a warm, damp spring. In Shanghai, eating the first seasonal foods of the year is still called “tasting spring,” 尝春, and for many people qingtuan is one of the first signs that spring has come.

Sources [3][4][5][7][8][9]

03

From green rice to green dumplings

Qingtuan are usually traced to the old custom of eating cold food before Qingming.

Qingming absorbed an older festival, Hanshi, the Cold Food Festival, which fell a day or two before it. On Hanshi no fire could be lit, so food was prepared in advance and eaten cold, and qingtuan were traditionally eaten cold too.

The clearest early link is in a Ming notebook, the Qixiu Leigao of Lang Ying. Under the heading “Mantou and green-and-white dumplings,” he writes that the ancients, at the Cold Food Festival, gathered leaves to dye rice green as an offering, to nourish the yang energy, and that this had now turned into green and white dumplings, 青白團子, with the same meaning. It is his own reading of the custom, not a recipe, but it shows that green dumplings were eaten at this season in the Ming.

A recipe, of sorts, appears in Yuan Mei’s Suiyuan Shidan of 1792. In his list of dim sum he gives green cakes and green dumplings a single line: 搗青草為汁，和粉作粉團，色如碧玉. Pound green grass for its juice, mix it with rice flour into dumplings, and they come out the color of green jade. A few decades later, the Suzhou writer Gu Lu recorded in his Qing Jia Lu, as Tianjin Daily quotes it, that qingtuan and cooked lotus root were sold in the markets for households to offer their ancestors at Qingming.

Sources [1][2][4][5]

04

Qingmingguo in Zhejiang

In Zhejiang villages they are still made at home.

In Anshan village in Ningbo, 69-year-old Tao Huifang makes qingmingguo every spring. She picks the youngest mugwort in the fields at dawn, then soaks rice, boils the mugwort, kneads the dough, fries the filling, shapes and steams, a routine she knows by heart. They are made before Qingming for two reasons: the mugwort is at its best then, and the cakes were needed for the ancestor offerings. Tao repeats a local saying, that eating qingmingguo keeps you from falling ill all year.

Ningbo makes them both sweet and savory. The sweet ones are filled with red bean paste or black sesame, rolled into balls and finished with a coat of soaked glutinous rice grains. The savory ones are filled with pork, spring bamboo shoots and pickled mustard greens, stir-fried first, and shaped into crescents like jiaozi with crimped edges. In the village they are steamed over a wood fire for about twenty minutes after the water boils. Old Ningbo families still prefer qingmingguo wrapped by hand to the factory-made kind, which they find lacks the plain, original taste; Tao learned from her mother and now teaches the village children.

In Jinhua, Lou Hongliang, a teacher who holds a provincial heritage title for Jinhua-style (婺式) pastries, sees qingtuan as a seasonal food made from edible plants growing close at hand; gathering them is still tied to spring outings into the countryside.

Sources [3][8]

05

Shanghai’s queues and new fillings

Every spring the old pastry shops of Shanghai draw queues around the block.

The modern craze has a date. On March 31, 2016, more than 300 people stood in a 65-meter queue outside Xinghualou, 杏花楼, on Fuzhou Road, for a new qingtuan filled with salted egg yolk and pork floss, at 8 yuan each; one buyer had waited six hours. They were shaped and steamed on the spot, a chef turning out three or four a minute and each steamer taking just over ten minutes. Shendacheng and Wangjiasha had queues for the same filling that day, so who made it first is unclear. The popular newcomer of the previous few years had been malantou, a wild spring green, and it is still sold.

Now sales peak from mid-March and the shops compete on new fillings. In 2026 Xinghualou added a “spring three delicacies” qingtuan of fresh pork, bamboo shoots and shiitake, and a bean paste version with a quarter less sugar. Shendacheng’s mashed potato and bacon went viral on social media. Wangjiasha leans on the classics: most of the nearly 60,000 qingtuan it made a day were mugwort with red bean paste, made from Haimen red beans that are boiled, sieved of their skins and washed, then stirred by hand in an iron wok over the open fire of an old earthen stove. Xinya (新雅) turned yanduxian, the city’s spring soup of fresh and cured pork with bamboo shoots, into a filling, and sold a large-prawn qingtuan for 16 yuan apiece.

The buyers have changed too. Young people photograph their qingtuan and post them online, which spreads the craze further. Visitors from other provinces buy them as gifts to take home: one man from Anhui bought three of every flavor to send back by courier. Outside Xinya on Nanjing Road, a Russian family on holiday stopped, read the signs and bought two to eat on the spot.

Sources [4][6][7]

06

Buying and eating qingtuan

Qingtuan need no cooking: buy them fresh and eat them the same day.

Fresh qingtuan are eaten as they are, at room temperature, as they traditionally were, or warm if you catch a batch straight from the steamer. They do not keep: Shanghai’s food inspectors class them as perishable, and chilled ones turn hard. To revive them, steam them briefly, or microwave them for about thirty seconds with any plastic wrap removed, and stop as soon as they are soft, or the skin slumps and splits. The dough is sticky, so take small bites, and remember that they are rich in sugar and fat.

Sources [4][6][7][9]

07

Mugwort qingtuan at home

The work is in the purée: keep it bright and use it fast.

This makes 15 with red bean paste, adapted from The Woks of Life. A blender struggles with a small amount of leaves, so the purée makes about 540 g, twice what you need; freeze the rest. Shop-bought red bean paste is fine. If you forage mugwort, be certain of the plant, since some poisonous plants look similar.

Sources [9]

08

More from Shanghai and the Chinese calendar

Other dishes on the atlas.