Qinghai Laba Festival is busy eating ice during the twelfth lunar month.

When it comes to what to eat on Laba Festival, people's first reaction is basically to eat Laba porridge. In some areas, people who don't grow rice eat laba noodles. As for dishes like Laba garlic and Laba tofu, they are also full of flavor. But when it comes to how to eat Laba Festival, it's about Qinghai in China, which is both appropriate and novel-yes, local people want to eat the common ice in winter on Laba Festival. Let Lao Huang Li introduce you to this unique custom.

In Qinghai, there is a custom of offering ice and eating ice on Laba Festival. On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, on the third day, it was freezing and the riverbed was as hard as iron. Before dawn, people go to the riverbed to get ice cubes like white jade crystals, which are enshrined in dung heaps, fields, courtyard centers, sheds at the head of troughs, and fruit tree branches to show that there will be plenty of rain and good weather in the coming year.

Qinghai proverb says: to measure the harvest in the coming year, look at Laba ice first. Men, women and children are not afraid of cold teeth and frozen tongues. "Gabba Gabba" is the same as eating rock candy. Chewing a few pieces of ice means eliminating diseases and disasters. After Laba, we will bid farewell to the old year and welcome the new year, and begin to be busy with the twelfth lunar month.

This "Four Fields Offering Bai Bing" ceremony is said to welcome auspicious gods and bless the bumper harvest of crops in the coming year. Legend has it that when the Tang Priest returned to Tongtianhe to fetch scriptures, the scrolls fell into the rapids, and Pig Bajie hurriedly salvaged some with a rake. Four disciples hurried to bask in the scriptures on a big stone. Who knows that the weather on the plateau is changeable, and all the water drops on the instantaneous warp are Bai Bing, with heavy snow and the north wind, so we have to roll up the warp.

Later, on the day of Laba, the master and his party arrived at the foot of Sun Moon Shandong, and the weather cleared up. So the Monkey King took out the scroll, carefully shook off the Bai Bing on it and dried it in the sun. The next year, wherever Bai Bing sowed, there were more golden ears of wheat than cattle hair, and more lively sheep than stars.

There is also a legend about "Laba Ice". It is said that one year, the Queen Mother got angry for some reason. As soon as her old lady stamped her foot, the milky way in the sky flowed to Xining, and when it was cold, it became ice. The water of Tianhe is called divine water, and people are scrambling to get it. Then, the old people say that eating Laba ice will keep you from getting sick. To this day, Laba still has the habit of eating ice in many places in Qinghai.