Eight-Treasure Rice Pudding (八宝饭 Babaofan)

The Eight-treasure Rice Pudding is made from glutinous rice supplemented with red jujubes, lotus seeds, lily, seeds of Job's tears, gingko, dried longan pulp, and finely cut green and red plums. These ingredients may also be substitute with walnut meat, haw jelly, raisin, peanut and cherry.

The Eight-treasure Rice Pudding is used as a banquet course for its pleasant colour, fragrance, taste and shape. In some places, brown sugar is melted with burning liquor and as the icing for the Eight-treasure Rice Pudding in some places.

This practice of burning liquor to melt brown sugar originated in the story of eight scholars recruited by King Wen of the Western Zhou Dynasty in present-day ShaanxiProvince to conquer the tyrannical King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty.

These scholars, who included Bo Da, Bo Shi, Zhong Tu, Shu Ye, and Shu XIa, indeed played a positive role in toppling the Shang Dynasty. When the triumph over King Zhou was celebrated in the Zhou capital city of Hao, the chefs of the imperial kitchen concocted a kind of putting made from eight treasured ingredients, and topped it with fiery-coloured haw juice to symbolize the “eight Zhou scholars burning King Zhou of Shang to death”.

The Eight-treasure Rice Pudding thus came down through the generations as a favoured course of the Chinese banquet.

According to Chinese tradition, the Eight-treasure Rice Pudding is served and eaten on the 7th of the 1st lunar month to mark the end of Spring Festival and the beginning of New Year.