Three Thousand Pestles a Day: The Rice Cake Team That Keeps the New Year's Sound - The Hands Behind Wenzhou's Culinary Heritage

For many in Wenzhou, the New Year begins with a sound: the rhythmic "dong, dong" of rice cakes being pounded. Zheng Shiwen has kept that sound alive for more than twenty years — his team raises a ten-kilogram pestle 3,000 times a day, two men working in perfect sync, one lifting and driving down the heavy wooden pestle, the other swiftly folding the scalding dough towards the centre with bare hands.

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For many people in Wenzhou, the flavour of the New Year begins with the sound of pounding rice cakes. For Zheng Shiwen of Taoshan, Ruian, that sound is not just the prelude to the Spring Festival — it is the rhythm of his life, a rhythm he has kept beating for more than two decades.

Zheng's craft came down from his father, and reaches back to his grandfather's generation — a family craft more than a hundred years old, now in its fourth generation. In the winter of 1997, he saw an opportunity: the rice cake teams in downtown Wenzhou had stopped working several years earlier. So he assembled a new team, loaded a green stone mortar weighing more than 200 kilograms, and moved from Taoshan into the city. At first, he set up his stall only for a month or two around the lunar twelfth month. But because the handmade cakes were so popular, the season stretched to seven or eight months a year — neighbours called on him for weddings, birthday celebrations and every kind of festive occasion. Today his team boasts seven or eight seasoned craftsmen, the eldest well over seventy. What pleases him more is that his son, young Zheng, has taken over sales and operations, keeping the family craft going.

Pounding rice cakes is a highly visual traditional skill, and its essence is the perfect coordination between "pounding" and "turning." The masters must jointly raise a pestle weighing more than twenty catties, and pound 30 batches a day, at least 100 strokes per batch — more than 3,000 strokes in total. It is a pure matter of teamwork: one man raises the pestle high and drives it into the centre of the glutinous rice mass, while the other swiftly turns the scalding dough from the edge to the centre with bare hands. Too slow, and the texture suffers; too quick, and hands get burned. The green stone mortar, polished smooth as jade, is the "living fossil" of the Zheng family's cakes, witness to countless hammerings.

The Zheng family's cakes have long moved beyond the traditional brown-sugar glutinous rice. To suit modern tastes, Zheng developed new varieties — black rice, osmanthus, mugwort — more than a dozen in all, giving the old craft new life. After three years of application, in 2020, the "Taoshan Rice Cake Making Technique" was officially inscribed on the Ruian municipal intangible cultural heritage list. With the certification, business grew even livelier. Zheng has taken his team to events such as the 2026 Wenzhou "Six Specialties" local-product carnival and the China International Grain and Oil Products and Equipment Technology Exhibition. He once took an order of more than 500 kilograms, supplying every household in a Wenzhou residential community.

Through the persistence of Zheng Shiwen and his rice cake team, the traditional craft has been kept alive — and with it, the steaming, heartwarming taste of the New Year in Wenzhou's collective memory. With every rise and fall of the pestle, they pound out not only the chewiness of glutinous rice, but the continuation of culture and nostalgia.