The Laba Festival: a bowl of porridge that starts the New Year

Always the eighth of the twelfth month on the Chinese calendar, and on the western one anywhere from late December to late January, because the twelfth lunar month straddles the western new year. That produces a wrinkle the other festivals on this site do not have: lunar-year 2022's Laba fell on December 30, 2022, so 2022 had two Labas and 2023 had none. The table is labeled by the western year each date lands in, with the lunar year beside it. The dates are computed from the same engine that runs our calendar converter.

In Beijing the day begins in a queue. Yonghegong, the Lama Temple, cooks Laba porridge in quantity and ladles it out to whoever comes, and so do Guanghua Temple, Tanzhe Temple and a dozen others; China Daily's report on the 2026 festival describes the crowds and singles out Yonghegong's as the most anticipated. People post their bowls afterward the way other cities post latte art. The bowl itself varies by region: the northern version is thick and hearty and comes with pickled Laba garlic on the side, the Jiangnan version is lighter and sweeter, and in the northwest they put lamb in it, which sounds wrong until you have stood outside in Lanzhou in January.

The garlic is the other thing the day is for. On Laba, northern households peel a head or two of garlic, drop the cloves into a jar of vinegar, and put the lid on. Xinhua's explainer gives the schedule: the garlic pickles "for more than 20 days before the Chinese New Year," by which time it "turns emerald green," and it is eaten with dumplings on New Year's Day. The color is the garlic's own reaction to cold and acid, and the jar on the windowsill is a calendar you can watch: when the cloves are jade all the way through, it is time to make the dumplings.

And then there is the rhyme, which every Chinese child can finish and which is the real reason a two-hundred-search-a-month festival gets a page here: "Little one, little one, don't be greedy; once Laba is past, it's the New Year." The twelfth month fills up behind the porridge. The kitchen god is sent off on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth, the house is swept, the couplets go up, and New Year's Eve arrives three weeks after the bowl. The festivals page lays the whole sequence out for this year and next; Laba is where it starts, and the sixteen days of the New Year itself are where it ends.

The fullest old description of the bowl is in the Yanjing Suishiji, a record of Beijing's year completed in 1900 by a Manchu official named Fucha Dunchong, and it reads like someone who had been served a bad one. Laba porridge, he says, is made from yellow millet, white rice, glutinous rice, small millet, water-chestnut meal, chestnuts, red beans and peeled date paste, cooked together in water; it is then decorated with walnuts dyed red, almonds, melon seeds, peanuts, hazelnuts and pine nuts, with white sugar, brown sugar and small raisins. Then the sentence that tells you he meant it: "On no account use lotus seeds, hyacinth beans, Job's tears or longan; they spoil the taste." That is the porridge equivalent of an Italian on the subject of cream in carbonara, and it is more than a century old.

He also gives the timetable. On the seventh, households shell the nuts and wash the pots and "work through the night, so that at daybreak the porridge is done." Some of it goes to the ancestors and the Buddha; the rest is sent round to relatives and friends, and "it must not pass noon," because a Laba porridge that arrives in the afternoon is an insult. Skilled households shaped the dates and walnuts on top into lions and little children "to show their ingenuity," and every gift bowl came with a side of pickled cabbage, about which the book makes the most Beijing observation in the whole calendar: "the quality of the cabbage foretells the rise or fall of the house." The court did it too, on a different scale. An older gazetteer he quotes says the emperor "presented porridge to the hundred officials" on the eighth, and at Yonghegong the lamas cooked through the night of the eighth for the Buddha in a pot "big enough to hold several dan of rice," with a minister specially sent to watch and make sure it was done with proper reverence. The temple still cooks. The minister has been replaced by the crowd.

The eighth is the easy half of the name. La, the twelfth month, is named for a sacrifice, and the sacrifice is older than the date. The Shuowen Jiezi, the dictionary finished around 100 CE, defines la as "the sacrifice to all the gods, on the third xu day after the winter solstice." Read that again: not the eighth of anything, but a day counted on the sixty-day cycle from the solstice, which means it moved from year to year, a great year-end feast for every spirit at once at which the leftovers, presumably, were considerable. Cai Yong, a Han scholar, listed what each dynasty had called it: jiaping under the Xia, qingsi under the Shang, the great zha under the Zhou, and la under the Han. The same word gives Chinese its name for cured winter meats, làròu, which is what you did with a pig in the La month.

By the sixth century the moving feast had a fixed address. The Jingchu Suishiji, an almanac of the middle Yangzi written by Zong Lin, states flatly that "the eighth day of the twelfth month is La day," and then describes what it looked like in a village: the proverb "when the La drum sounds, the spring grass grows," and the villagers tying on waisted drums, putting on "Hu-gong heads," a kind of mask, dressing as the Buddhist guardian giants, and going out to drum the plague out of the settlement before bathing to wash off the year's sins. That is the festival before it had a porridge: noise, masks and disinfection at the turn of the year, the same instinct that gives you firecrackers three weeks later.

The porridge was already lurking a few weeks earlier in the same almanac. At the winter solstice, Zong Lin says, people made a red-bean congee "to ward off plague," and he explains why: a son of the god Gonggong, a wastrel, died on the solstice and became a plague ghost, and the ghost is afraid of red beans. A warm bowl of beans against midwinter sickness, then, was there in the sixth century, on a different day, for a different reason, waiting for a better story.

The better story was Buddhist, and the first person to write down the name "Laba congee" is Meng Yuanlao, remembering the lost Song capital of Kaifeng in the 1140s. On the eighth of the twelfth month, he says, small bands of monks and nuns went through the streets chanting, carrying a gilt or wooden Buddha seated in a basin of scented water, sprinkling it with a willow branch from door to door and asking for alms; the great temples held bathing-the-Buddha assemblies "and gave a seven-treasure, five-flavor congee to their followers, which is called Laba congee." And then the line that shows it had already jumped the temple wall: "on that day the people of the capital also each boiled a porridge of fruits and mixed ingredients at home and ate it."

Why that day? Because Chinese Buddhism fixed it as the morning the Buddha attained enlightenment. The Chixiu Baizhang Qinggui, the imperially revised rulebook for Chan monasteries compiled in 1336, sets out the liturgy: on "the eighth day of the La month, the day our teacher Shakyamuni Tathagata attained the Way," the abbot leads the monks in laying out "incense, flowers, lamps, candles, tea, fruit and fine foods" as an offering, and the announcement recalls how "before the mountain of perfect awakening he saw the morning star and awoke." The folk version, which Xinhua still tells, adds a village girl who saved the fasting prince with a bowl of milk, which is why the day is kept with a bowl of something warm. No early text records the girl; treat her as the story the porridge tells about itself, and the temple offering as the record.

By the eighteenth century the porridge was so ordinary that a novelist could use it for a joke. In chapter nineteen of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu, lying on a bed trying to keep his cousin Daiyu from napping, makes up a story. In a cave in Yangzhou lived a tribe of mouse spirits. "That year, on the seventh of the La month, the old mouse took his seat to hold council and said: 'Tomorrow is Laba, and everyone in the world will be boiling Laba porridge. Our stores of fruit are running low; we had better take this chance to go and plunder some.'" A scout reports that the temple at the foot of the hill has the most, with granaries of rice and beans past counting and five kinds of fruit: red dates, chestnuts, peanuts, water chestnuts and fragrant taro. The old mouse hands out arrows of command, and one by one the mice go off to steal rice, beans, dates, chestnuts.

Only the taro is left, and the smallest, weakest mouse volunteers. The others laugh. The little mouse explains that it will not steal like the rest but will transform itself into a taro, roll into the pile, and carry the store away from the inside; the others demand a demonstration; it shakes itself and turns, not into a taro, but into a beautiful young lady. "Wrong, wrong," cry the mice. "The daughter of Salt Commissioner Lin," says the little mouse, "is the real fragrant jade." Daiyu, whose father is Salt Commissioner Lin and whose name means "black jade," sits bolt upright and attacks him. The pun does not survive translation; the recipe does. Dates, chestnuts, peanuts, water chestnuts, taro: it is Fucha Dunchong's list, a century and a half earlier, minus the things that spoil the taste.