Full coverage: Dragon Boat Festival

Zongzi is a traditional food that Chinese people enjoy during the Dragon Boat Festival. Over the years, however, there's a risk that the art of making zongzi will be gone as fewer and fewer younger people know how to make them.

A resident of Shizuishan, in northwest China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region, makes traditional Chinese rice pudding. Peng Zhaozhi / Xinhua

It’s a very common Chinese food, eaten every year around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival. But making it takes practice and skills. And that is my challenge for today - learning how to make zongzi.

My shifu - 91-year-old Zhou Qiyu. According to her, the process is easy - fold the leaves into a cone, fill it with sticky rice and various stuffings, wrap it and tie it up with a string. She makes it look very easy, but then she has been making zongzi for quite some time.

"It was in the 1980s. My husband and I had just retired. My youngest son was unemployed, and his wife had just had a baby. I had to raise a family of five," Zhou said.

It was during the Dragon Boat Festival that Zhou Qiyu decided to started a small zongzi business together with some of her friends. In this residential complex, many families faced similar struggles. They were all workers at the same construction company at a time of mass lay-offs.

After an early taste of success, Zhou Qiyu thought zongzi could also help others.

"Everybody should make some fortune. Everybody deserves a good life," Zhou said.

Dozens of families followed her lead. Zhang Guiying was one of them.

"I was so ashamed at first. We all had jobs before. We belonged to a company. But Granny convinced us. She said we are putting food on the table through hard work. It’s much more decent than slacking or stealing," Zhang said.

Over the years, not only did they survive their hardships but they also thrived. Now, it’s hard to imagine that all this was the result of mass redundancies - a street packed with stall after stall of zongzi vendors, from all over the city, hoping to match the same economic success. But for Zhou Qiyu, zongzi has become so much more than just a livelihood.

"It’s an important festival - thousands of years of history. And I’m making my contribution," Zhou said.

That contribution is to pass on the tradition to generations to come.