Sales of traditional delicacy surge as Dragon Boat Festival nears

As this year's Dragon Boat Festival is just around the corner, the sales of zongzi, a time-honored delicacy for Chinese people, is on the rise across China in more varied varieties and volumes.

The Dragon Boat Festival, also known as Duanwu Festival, falls on May 31 this year. It is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month on the Chinese lunar calendar to commemorate ancient Chinese poet Qu Yuan from the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.).

Zongzi is also an essential part of this Duanwu tradition. This savory dish is a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves.

At a farmer's market in Kunming City in southwest China's Yunnan Province, the specialty zongzi of the Buyi ethnic minority group in the neighboring Guizhou Province has become popular with local customers.

A zongzi seller told China Central Television (CCTV) that the shop sold more than 800 kilograms of this seasonal food per day, and was gearing up for increasing demand.

"Four or five tons of fresh leaves may be arriving in Kunming tomorrow," he said.

The surging demand for zongzi has also boosted the sales of relevant materials at a bustling wholesale market for meat, poultry, and eggs in Ningbo City in east China's Zhejiang Province.

"Pork belly is currently the best-selling product because it's the season for making zongzi. It's now 12 yuan per jin [about 3.3 U.S. dollars per kilogram]. Usually, we sell seven or eight pigs a day, but now we sell more than a dozen," said Zhou Qingguo, a meat wholesaler.

In addition to meat, the sales of salted duck eggs -- one of the local must-eat delicacies for Duanwu celebrations and an important ingredient for the filling of zongzi -- continue to climb as the holiday approaches. A stall owner said that around 11,000 salted duck eggs were sold daily, double the normal amount.

Restaurants in Shanghai have seamlessly integrated cured pork with fava beans and dried scallops to make zongzi, gaining the favor of discerning eaters.

"The daily sales of zongzi have generally exceeded 5,000. This year, we introduced a special zongzi made with Iberico pork. These have sold out every day at around 10 o'clock," Yao Jianhua, head of the dim sum department of a restaurant in Shanghai.

Sales of traditional delicacy surge as Dragon Boat Festival nears

The death toll from a landfill collapse in the central Philippine city of Cebu has risen to eight by Monday morning as search and rescue operations continued for another 28 missing people.

The landfill collapse occurred on Thursday as dozens of sanitation workers were working at the site. The disaster has already caused injuries of 18 people.

Family members of the missing people said the rescue progress is slow, and the hope for the survival of their loved ones is fading.

"For me, maybe I’ve accepted the worst result already because the garbage is poisonous and yesterday, it was raining very hard the whole day. Maybe they’ve been poisoned. For us, alive or dead, I hope we can get their bodies out of the garbage rubble," said Maria Kareen Rubin, a family member of a victim.

Families have set up camps on high ground near the landfill, awaiting news of their relatives. Some people at the site said cries for help could still be heard hours after the landfill collapsed, but these voices gradually faded away.

Bienvenido Ranido, who lost his wife in the disaster, said he can't believe all that happened.

"After they gave my wife oxygen, my kids and I were expecting that she would be saved that night because she was still alive. But the night came and till the next morning, they didn't manage to save her," he said.

Death toll in central Philippine landfill collapse rises to eight