Celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, the Dragon Boat Festival goes by many names—Fifth Day Festival, Double Fifth Day, or Fifth Month Festival. Thanks to the beloved tradition of eating zongzi, many locals playfully dub it the "Zongzi Festival."

While popular folklore traces the holiday's origins to honoring Qu Yuan, the loyal minister of the Warring States period, a deeper dive into the Chinese characters reveals fascinating seasonal wisdom. Duan(端) means "beginning," while wu (午) shares its sound with "five" (五). Through the lens of traditional Chinese timekeeping, where five days make a hou (候), three hou form a qi (氣), six qi create a season, and four seasons complete a year—giving us 24 solar terms and 72 hou—Duanwu essentially marks the first significant seasonal transition of the fifth month.

The main types of Taiwan's zongzi eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival are Northern-style zongzi and Southern-style zongzi.

Northern vs. Southern: A Tale of Two Techniques

Northern zongzi boasts bold, robust flavors, while Southern zongzi offers a lighter, more delicate taste.

Northern-style zongzi starts by stir-frying raw glutinous rice with fillings until half-cooked, incorporating braised pork, shiitake mushrooms, and salted egg yolks. The mixture is then wrapped in leaves and steamed separately. The result leans toward the oily and salty side, with distinctly separated rice grains that maintain their individual texture.

Southern-style zongzi uses similar fillings but takes a different approach—soaked raw glutinous rice and ingredients are wrapped together, then boiled directly in water until fully cooked and tender. This creates a stickier, softer texture with a notably lighter flavor profile.

Beyond these classics, you'll also find vegetable zongzi containing only peanuts, and the sweet alkaline zongzi (鹼粽)—made with lye water and served drizzled with honey or dipped in sugar.

Mainland-style zongzi and Hakka zongzi are Taiwan's other two representative types of zongzi. Mainland-style zongzi was brought over with the large numbers of military personnel and civilians who relocated to Taiwan after 1949, with Huzhou zongzi being more common. Its characteristics include a longer shape and fillings mostly of braised pork, egg yolk, among other ingredients.

Hakka zongzi comes in several varieties: rice zongzi, which uses steamed round glutinous rice wrapped with dried shrimp, red shallots, preserved radish, shredded mushrooms, pork, and similar ingredients; ban zongzi (粄粽, where ban refers to rice dough), which involves grinding soaked glutinous rice into rice milk, draining the water, then kneading it into ban dough and adding preserved radish and other components; wild ginger flower zongzi, which uses wild ginger flower leaves to wrap mountain mushrooms, pork, glutinous rice, and additional ingredients.