Dongzhi Festival
Next: December 22, 2026
Longest night, warmest bowl of tangyuan.
The story
Where it comes from
Dongzhi (冬至), 'winter's extreme', is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the northern year and one of the first of the 24 solar terms to be fixed: ancient astronomers found it by measuring the noon shadow of a gnomon, which is longest on this day. Under the Zhou dynasty it began the new year, and after the Han calendar moved New Year to spring it stayed a great festival, the 'little new year'. Hence the saying 冬至大如年, 'Dongzhi is as big as New Year'. It falls on 21 or 22 December.
How it's celebrated
Families gather for dinner, and the bowl that matters is tangyuan, glutinous rice balls whose roundness stands for reunion; much of northern China eats dumplings instead. In Hong Kong many offices let staff leave early to get home, and Macao makes the day a public holiday. In Malaysia and Singapore, where it never turns cold, it is above all a Chinese family festival: relatives roll pink and white tangyuan together, offer the first bowls to the ancestors, then eat.
Did you know
- In Taiwan, eating your bowl of tangyuan at Dongzhi is said to make you one year older, a custom called tiansui, 'adding a year'.
- In the Southern and Northern Dynasties period, the mathematician Zu Chongzhi measured the solstice precisely enough to build a new and more accurate calendar, the Daming calendar, around it.
- Some Peranakan families in Singapore stick red and white kueh ee, their name for the rice balls, to the back of the front door to keep bad luck out and let good fortune in.
The greeting
冬至快乐 · Dōngzhì kuàilè
Coming up next
- The First Transistor · December 23, 2026
- Earthrise · December 24, 2026
- Christmas · December 25, 2026
- Boxing Day · December 26, 2026
- Charles Babbage's Birthday · December 26, 2026
- International Day of Epidemic Preparedness · December 27, 2026