Black Rice Festival

Name and category

According to the public notice of January 2024, Black Rice Festival is one of the new inscriptions in the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level intangible cultural heritage items, in the folk-custom category; its recommended guardian is the Hefeng Town Cultural and Sports Centre and the reporting area is Hefeng Town. Two folk-custom items were put forward by Hefeng Town in this batch; the other is Horn Lantern.

The notice uses the name rendered here as "black rice festival", not the names of the food itself or of a black-rice festival day. A local-history post uses the wording "black-rice festival day". This entry follows the wording of the notice and does not merge the item with other names.

Dates and place of transmission

According to Nanjing Daily reports of 2023 and 2025, the festival is held at Chenguo in Wucunqiao Village (community), Hefeng Town, on the seventh, eighth and ninth days of the fourth lunar month, three days together, joined to the local custom of making black rice around the Dragon Boat Festival. The reports put the custom at "about 500 years"; this is the reporting figure and not an exact date.

Ritual sequence and activities

The festival includes opera performances (chiefly Huangmei opera in the reports), a black-rice market and a temple fair. A report by the Hefeng Town People's Government in 2024 records that the 2024 Wucunqiao countryside festival was held on 15 May, guided by the Lishui District Bureau of Culture and Tourism, the District Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the Hefeng Town People's Government, and that five ICH items, including the festival, were presented with plaques on the occasion (the presentation of a plaque is not the same as entry in a list).

Folk account, to be verified. A local-history post on Lishui Online says the festival is bound up with the sacrifice to Cishen Dadi, held over the three days around the eighth day of the fourth lunar month (called the deity's birthday in the post), with a "processing of the deity" rite and opera; the rite is organised by 14 heads, 11 bearers and 10 performers of the minor deities, and a stone tablet inscribed with the twenty-seventh year of the Kangxi era stands before the Cishen Dadi shrine in the village. The post is by a local-history enthusiast, its authority is limited, and its ritual details, numbers and inscription are not corroborated by an official or academic source; this entry marks the passage as a folk account.

Making the black rice

According to China Jiangsu Network in 2023 and Nanjing Daily in 2025, the key ingredient is the leaf of the nanzhu tree, locally called the black-rice leaf: washed, pounded, rubbed with warm water and strained, and the juice used to soak glutinous rice until it turns glossy black, then steamed. It may be eaten with sugar, and is made into black-rice cakes, zongzi, glutinous rice cakes, crust and wine.

Legend and history

Tradition has it (a folk legend, told by villagers and reported by China Jiangsu Network in 2023): long ago a mother in Chenguo took meals each day to her son in prison, but the guards ate the good food. She then pounded the leaves of the black-rice tree, soaked rice in the juice, and the cooked rice turned black; the guards took it for spoiled and the son got his food. Moved by the mother's devotion, the villagers followed suit, and so arose the custom of making black rice around the Dragon Boat Festival. This is the folk legend of the origin of the Chenguo festival, a folk account and not history.

Set out apart from the legend are the documentary traces: black rice is the "qingjing rice" of old verse, celebrated by Du Fu in Tang, Lu Guimeng in the late Tang, Yu Liangneng in Song and Qu Dajun in Qing; and Yuan Mei in Qing records in the Suiyuan Menu that he drank black-rice wine at the Ye household in Lishui, and that by Lishui custom a family with a newborn daughter brewed a jar of wine made from the rice. All these poems and gazetteer lines are quoted second-hand through China Jiangsu Network in 2023; this library holds no full text of the originals and does not quote them directly.

Points in doubt

First, "about 500 years" is the reporting figure, not an exact date, and no year is given.

Second, the festival is recorded as falling on the seventh, eighth and ninth days of the fourth lunar month; the dates given in reports of different years vary, so they are annual arrangements and no fixed calendar is stated.

Third, the ritual details (Cishen Dadi, the processing of the deity, the numbers of heads and bearers, the Kangxi tablet) appear only in a local-history post and are a folk account; this library has found no official or academic corroboration.

Fourth, the source is the public notice of January 2024; the formal list has not been obtained here, so the entry follows the wording of the notice and is not written as already published.

Fifth, this library searched the full texts of the five Lishui County Gazetteers it holds and found no passage on black rice or nanzhu leaves, so the festival's earlier history has no gazetteer basis.