Mugwort Rice Cakes

Mugwort rice cakes are made by kneading glutinous rice flour with pounded fresh mugwort leaves and steaming, the skin jade-green with the herb's distinctive fragrance; fillings come sweet or savoury—sweet with sesame, peanut and sugar, savoury with bamboo shoot, cured pork and dried bean curd—shaped as rounds or dumplings.

The cakes are said to have been created by the "new Hakka" who returned to Gannan to commemorate the hardships of migration, later becoming a Qingming custom of offering the cakes to ancestors and to Guanyin; Qing-era local gazetteers already record "rice flour mixed with mugwort" for Qingming cakes, a fruit of Hakka migration culture and seasonal food custom.

Mostly made and steamed fresh around Qingming and eaten hot, the mugwort fragrance meeting chewy rice and sweet-or-savoury filling; it is both an ancestral offering and a spring seasonal treat, now sold year-round in restaurants and snack shops across Xinfeng and the rest of Ganzhou.

The jade-green colour, the bitter-sweet herbal note of mugwort against chewy rice, and the legend of Hakka migration behind it are the most evocative marks of these cakes.