Eight-treasure Rice Pudding

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 Chinese 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.


Babaofan

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 traditional culture, 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.