The Chinese winter solstice, Dongzhi: the longest night, the two foods, and the year that used to begin here

Ask a northerner and the answer is dumplings, jiaozi, folded by the family that afternoon and eaten in quantities that would alarm a doctor. Ask a southerner and it is tangyuan, balls of glutinous rice flour, some of them pink, some stuffed with black sesame or sweet bean paste, floated in a sugared soup, and the line between the two answers runs, as most Chinese food lines do, along the Yangtze. The northern story that the dumpling is shaped like an ear and keeps your ears from freezing is told every year and appears in no text before the twentieth century; treat it as a story. The southern rice ball has paperwork. Gu Lu's Qingjialu, a record of Suzhou's year written in 1830, has "every household grinding flour into balls" stuffed with sugared pork, dried fruit or shredded radish, "as offerings to the ancestors and the stove god," and two county gazetteers from the Zhejiang coast, one from the Kangxi reign and one from the Guangxu, record "solstice balls" and glutinous-rice tangyuan with red-bean filling "offered to the gods and the ancestors."

Beijing, characteristically, did neither. Fucha Dunchong's Yanjing Suishiji, completed in 1900, is blunt about it: the emperor sacrifices to Heaven, the officials send in their congratulations, and "the people do not treat it as a festival; they only eat wontons," which pairs with the noodles of midsummer in a proverb he quotes, "solstice wontons, midsummer noodles." He then spends a paragraph refuting a theory that the wonton was named after two barbarian clans, and offers his own: the wonton is shaped like an egg and therefore like the primal chaos, hundun, from which the year is about to be reborn. It is an unlikely etymology and a lovely one.

If you want to see what the solstice looked like when it still outranked the New Year, there is a county in Zhejiang where you can. In Sanmen, on the coast south of Ningbo, villages that are still one clan hold a solstice rite that went onto China's national register of intangible cultural heritage in 2014, as an extension of the entry for the twenty-four solar terms. The register's own description of it reads like a stage direction. At the yin hour, three to five in the morning, the principal celebrant, his assistants, the boys and girls chosen for the parts and the stewards take their places, all selected by clan rule. First a prayer to Heaven. Then the sacrifice to the ancestors, with three offerings and a read prayer, the descendants kneeling in the old left-and-right order of the generations "like wild geese in formation." Then a play, performed for the longevity of the old. Then a banquet for every elder in the village. The local proverb, the register notes, is the Suzhou one: the solstice is as big as the New Year, with a Sanmen coda about the food, "bitter swallows at Qingming, sweet balls at the solstice."

The solstice is the easiest point in the year to find. Stand a pole in the ground, mark the noon shadow every day, and the longest shadow of the winter is the solstice, no arithmetic required; it is the first thing any culture with a stick fixes, and the Chinese calendar was built outward from it. The Zhou dynasty, three thousand years ago, began its year with the month that held the solstice, which is why the old texts call the solstice month the first month and why the current New Year, moved by the Han in 104 BC to the first lunar month, is still defined by reference to it: Chinese New Year is the second new moon after the winter solstice, and can be nothing else.

What the day meant is set out in the oldest book of all. The Book of Changes gives the solstice its own hexagram, Fu, "Return," thunder under the earth, and the commentary on its image says what a ruler does with it: "the former kings shut the passes on the solstice day; merchants did not travel, and the ruler did not tour." The idea is that the solstice is the instant yang, the warm and rising half of the year, is born again, one thin line of it under six months of dark, and that anything loud or moving on that day might crush it. So the empire held still. The Book of the Later Han, describing the Han court's ritual year, turns that into a working rule: from the start of winter the officials wear black; "around the solstice the gentleman rests his body and stills himself, the hundred officials cease all business and hold no court, and only after choosing an auspicious hour do they take up affairs again."

Then the court did something that tells you it was run by people who wanted proof. Because the solstices are "the extremes of yin and yang, where the faint breath is born," eight specialist musicians were called in to catch the moment: some blew the pitch pipe of the season, some struck its bell and chime and drum, one "measured the shadow of the gnomon," and one "weighed water, a sheng of it, which in winter is thirteen liang heavier." Cold water is denser than warm; they had found the turn of the year on a balance. And having found it, they congratulated one another. Cai Yong, the Han scholar, gave the reason in a line the later books repeat: "at the winter solstice the yang breath rises and the ruler's way lengthens, therefore we congratulate; at the summer solstice the yin breath rises, therefore we do not." By the Wei and Jin, the Qingjialu notes from the Book of Song, the emperor received the congratulations of the whole court on the day "at a lesser audience, second in meaning only to New Year's morning." Twelve hundred years later the shopkeepers of Suzhou were still doing the same thing with baskets of food, and had a proverb for it.

The day after the solstice the cold gets worse, for the same lagging reason that August is hotter than June, and the tradition's answer was to count. From the solstice, nine periods of nine days, eighty-one in all, take you to the edge of spring, and there was a chart for keeping score. Fucha Dunchong describes the Beijing version he had drawn as a child, "nine rows of nine circles, eighty-one in all; from the solstice you fill one a day, the top half for cloud, the bottom for sun, the left for wind, the right for rain, and the whole circle for snow," and then quotes the older, prettier form from a Ming description of the capital: "on the solstice, households paint a branch of plum in outline, with eighty-one petals, and color one petal a day; when the petals are done the nine nines are out and spring is deep." Suzhou counted with a rhyme instead, which the Qingjialu records in full and which begins, "one nine, two nine, call to a friend and keep your hands in your sleeves; three nine, twenty-seven, the wind plays a pipe through the fence; four nine, thirty-six, you sleep at night as if out in the dew," and carries on, with a beggar dancing in the street at five nine, to the flies of six nine and the cat and dog asleep on the ground at eight.

The oldest way of watching the year turn was more precise than either. Zong Lin's sixth-century Record of the Seasons of Jing-Chu says simply that on the solstice "the shadow is measured," and the commentary explains how the palaces of the Wei and Jin did it: with a red thread laid along the noon shadow, "and after the solstice the shadow grows longer by a thread each day." That is the whole festival in one image, a woman in a courtyard with a piece of red silk, checking that the sun has come back.

Before the dumplings and the rice balls there was a bowl of red-bean congee, and it was not for eating so much as for aiming. The same sixth-century record has, for the solstice, "make red-bean congee, to ward off plague," and gives the reason in its commentary: Gonggong, the water god of the old myths, had a worthless son who died on the winter solstice and became a plague ghost, and the ghost is afraid of small red beans. So you cook them. A few weeks later, on the eighth of the twelfth month, the same book has the villagers driving out the plague with drums and masks, and the red-bean bowl migrated down the calendar to become the sweet, many-grained porridge of Laba, the festival that now opens the run-up to New Year. The solstice bowl is the older one, and a household that eats red-bean tangyuan on the solstice, as the Zhejiang gazetteers describe, is keeping it without knowing.