A red ball in mouth
By shirly on 2016-03-28

If you come to China, you may see some children, even adult, take a kind of red balls to eat. This kind of red balls are called Crispy Sugar-Coated Haws (Bingtang hulu in Chinese), which are regarded as a kind of traditional Chinese delicacy .

With its sour and sweet flavor, the Crispy Sugar-Coated Haws have accompany many people when they are young. This kind of food is made of haws and sugar, with the function of stimulating appetite, improving the skin and enhancing the intelligence.

They can be ususally seen at temple fair in Spring Festival in Beijing. The red fruit are clustered by a stick, and coated with crispy sugar, making it a decoration of the festival.

The appearance of the Crispy Sugar-Coated Haws can be traced back to Song Dynasty, when Zhaoting, Emperor Guangzong of Song, was on the trone. One of his favorate concubine, Lady Huang caught an illness and became sick of food and drink. Even with royal doctors' careful treatment, she didn't get better. This worried the emperor and he made an order to ask for folk doctor to help cure the Lady. After a quack doctor's diagnosis, he made a prescription that eating 5-10 pieces of haws decocted with rock candy before every meal can cure the disease in half a month. And the Lady recovered as expected with this prescription.

This kind of prescription later spred to folk people and they clustered them to sell and created the delicacy of Crispy Sugar-coated Hows. 

Now the meaning of this kind of delicacy is far beyond its contribution to Chinese foos, but also is endowed with culture token. It now represents a kind of simple and sceren commnunity life.