Realgar wine

(Photo/People.cn)

Drinking realgar wine in the Dragon Boat Festival period is a prevalent custom in the Yangtze River basin area. Realgar wine is a kind of liquor or yellow wine made by soaking realgar powder. As a kind of traditional Chinese medicine, realgar can be used as an antidote and insecticide, so ancient people thought realgar could ward off snakes, scorpions, and other harmful insects and animals. There is an old saying that goes: "drink realgar wine and keep diseases away". The main ingredient of realgar is arsenic sulfide, which is poisonous. Therefore, people only add a small amount of realgar in wine, and it needs to be exposed to sunlight, sometimes from the first day of May to the fifth. Realgar wine is one of the "five yellow" dishes which are traditionally served during the Dragon Boat Festival in Jiangsu and Zhejiang area. The other four are yellow croaker, cucumber, eel and duck egg yolk, with each containing the Chinese character Huang (meaning yellow) in its name.