Holiday dough snacks a unique gem in province

Residents shop for Spring Festival decorations at a store in Houma city.LI ANYUN/FOR CHINA DAILY

As Spring Festival draws near, residents in Shanxi province are busy making snacks with dough and other ingredients.

The dough snacks are meant not only to serve diners during the most important festival of the year, but also to bring fortune and good luck to the families.

Wenxi, a county in the south of Shanxi, is renowned throughout the province for its auspicious dough snacks.

Dough snacks there are made with centuries-old techniques, and the process was included on China's intangible cultural heritage list in 2008.

Zhang Duanduan is a master of dough snacks, especially dough buns, in Wadi township in Wenxi.

Dough buns are also called "flowery buns" due to their rich shapes and colors.

Several days before Spring Festival, which falls on Feb 12 this year, the 82-year-old woman was busy working in her flowery bun studio with fellow villagers.

The studio is a small household business she founded to make products for markets in Shanxi and in other parts of the country.

Zhang was preparing an order from a client in Beijing, who wanted to buy a batch of tiger-shaped buns for the one-month celebration of his newborn baby and also for Spring Festival.

"Tiger is the lucky animal for babies, as it symbolizes strength, courage and health," Zhao said.

Zhao, who has been in the trade for half a century, has an admirable skill in making buns with traditional forms. But her fellow villager, Zhang Haiyun, in her 30s, likes to modernize the art to meet the demands of younger customers.

The flowery buns Zhang Haiyun makes are even more flowery. They feature festively colored flowers like roses and lilies.

Zhang Haiyun operates a company for her innovative local specialty products.

"While catering to the aesthetics of younger people, we maintain our traditional techniques to keep the genuine taste of Wenxi flowery buns that stand out from other varieties throughout the country," the entrepreneur said.

In Shanxi, making flowery buns is usually accompanied with other arts like paper-cutting, making red lanterns and writing Spring Festival couplets.

The popular folk traditions for Spring Festival have drawn enthusiasm among foreigners living in Shanxi.

On Feb 1, more than 20 foreign students at the international school of Taiyuan University of Technology toured a community in the provincial capital of Taiyuan to experience the local Spring Festival culture.

They wrote couplets, made paper-cuts and cooked traditional Chinese dishes with local residents.

"I have celebrated three Spring Festivals in China and I made dumplings and cooked noodles every time by myself," said a Nigerian student who goes by the Chinese name of Wen Xinbian.

"But the most exciting thing is writing Spring Festival couplets, because I've made steady progress in Chinese calligraphy and gained a better understanding of Chinese culture over the past three years."

Guo Yanjie and Li Shu contributed to this story.

By YUAN SHENGGAO