Dumpling Festival – Annual Day of Indigestion

端午节安康. Today (5th day of 5th month of the Lunar Calendar) is the annual dumpling festival and I helped made some of the famous Tng family Teochew-style rice dumplings.

Making bakchang is a laborious affair. You need (wo)manpower and lots of prep of ingredients. The fillings were prepared beforehand and every year we would make five different types of dumplings – Teochew-style (with diced pork, salty egg yolk, chestnut), mung bean with pork lard, Nonya-style (sweet diced pork filling), mushroom and pork special and Keechang (plain glutinous rice with alkaline water).

This is the one taste that I always missed when I was working overseas. Every year during Duanwu Festival, I would start thinking about these rice dumplings, which are made to commemorate a famous poet and politician, Qu Yuan  (circa 343-278 BC) from Chu State.

To cut the long story short, he was slandered by his political opponents, and cold-storage by the King of Chu, after he warned the mighty Chu of the impending dangers of the up and coming powerful Qin State. Fast forward to 278 BC, Chu was annexed by the Qin. In despair and disappointment, he committed suicide by wading into the River Miluo 汨罗江  carrying a heavy stone. The countryman of Chu found out what happened decided to wrap rice with leaves into a dumpling and threw them into the river in hope that the fish will not eat Qu’s body. The dumpling became bak chang and the action of rolling the boats in the river became dragon boat races, and the festival was known to the West as Dragon Boat Festival. So I digressed….

Making bakchang is a labour intensive affair and usually involves all the woman folks in the family in the old days. These days, it’s my sisters and sisters-in-law that are involved in making the bakchangs. The next generation has started to get involved.

They are then washed and into the rice we mixed some salt and pepper powder for the pork dumpling. For the rest, we just used washed rice.

You take a couple of bakchang leaves and make a small triangular cup by twisting it. Then you scoop in a spoonful of glutinous rice and then start topping up the fillings followed by another two spoons of rice. Then with one quick action, you wrap it all up with the remainder of the leaves that did not form the cup. Then you use a string to tie it up properly. You can see it isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Princess did much better than I, managing to get all her dumplings right the very first time. However they were smaller than mine as her hands were smaller and therefore made a smaller cup.

After several attempts, I managed to get the hang of it and made a bunch of them. Then it’s into the boiling water the whole bunch of bakchang went for whole 90 minutes, That would cook the glutinous rice properly.

Every year we make about 300+ of the different types to be shared among family members. The ingredient list reads 1.5 kg of glutinous rice, 3.5 kg of pork belly, 100 salted duck eggs, 1 kg of chestnuts, 500 g of dried shiitake mushrooms, 500 g of mung beans. In the end, it would cost around $2 of ingredients per bakchang (2026 prices), and we have not added any gas and manpower cost. That’s why the bakchangs are so expensive these days.

Jun 2026