Festivals · Around 4–6 April. One of the two festivals fixed to the solar calendar rather than the lunar one.
Families visit ancestral graves, clear the weeds, lay food and flowers, and burn paper offerings — including, increasingly, paper phones and paper cars. It is more tender than sombre; people picnic afterwards. The name means 'clear and bright', and it doubles as the start of spring outings: kite-flying is traditional, and the willow is out. Visitors should be aware this is a three-day public holiday and domestic travel spikes hard. It is also when the year's first green tea is picked — pre-Qingming Longjing from the hills west of Hangzhou is the most expensive tea in China for about a fortnight.
Eat — Qingtuan (青团) — green rice dumplings coloured with mugwort, sold from Shanghai bakeries for a few weeks only, with queues to match.
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