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Jiange Meat Festival: Eat Meat as You Like |
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On the first day of the tenth lunar month, Jushanya Village, Chengbei Town, Jiange County always witnesses crowded villagers gather from dozens of kilometers away gather here to enjoy Meat Festival, a folk festival.
The folk of Meat Festival has been shaped for quite a long time. As the name implies, Meat Festival is a festival for everyone to eat meat together. It is said that in Ming Dynasty, on Wenchang Gathering, the third day of the second lunar month, and Cattle God Gathering, the first day of the tenth lunar month, villagers from Jushanya Village would worship gods to pray for favorable weather and peace and prosperity of the nation by offering entire pigs. After worshiping ceremony, every household could get a piece of cooked meat of one to two kilograms. Then everyone would sit down on the ground and eat it up. Gradually it is shaped as Meat Festival. Current Meat Festival has been evolved into a banquet with 11 dishes including cold dishes, steamed dishes and fried dishes. The last dish, a piece of meat of 20 square centimeters, more than 3.3 centimeters in height, and over 2 km in weight, both fat and lean is served, which is cooked in an unique way with rib meat apart from lean meat. This big meat should be simmered and stewed on the day before with spices until all flavors are into the meat, greasy comes out, and the meat does not flow. If eaten with chopsticks, it tastes like delicious tofu without chewing.
The local people consider that the meat is used for worshiping gods. The more you eat the meat, the more you will be blessed. Therefore, some people from Mianyang, Langhzong, Nanbu, Cangxi, Guangyuan will be here to take part in competing for eating meat.
Jushanya Meat Festival used a unique folk ritual practice in China. In recent years, due to the advanced age and poor health of the head and the cooks of this festival, Meat Festival, with hundreds of years tradition, is almost ceased opening. In order to inherit the special folk practice of Meat Festival, Chengbei Town Government increased effects to protect it by arranging personnels to assist the opening, providing subsidy funds and constructing a cement road to Jushanya Village. At present, Meat Festival has developed into a folk gathering in combination with ritual, agricultural trading and tourism. Jushanya Meat Festival has been applied for the third batch of intangible cultural heritage in Guangyuan. |
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