Spring Festival is just around the corner, and many will return home to have New Year's dinner with their loved ones, an event often hailed as the most important meal of the year. New Year Eve dinners are manifested in different ways in different parts of China. What is your favorite dish for this festive meal?

What is your favorite dish for Spring Festival?

What is your favorite dish for Spring Festival?

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  1. What is your favorite dish for Spring Festival?

    Dumplings are a very common dish for northern China, symbolizing reunion and fortune.

    Rice dumplings are made from glutinous rice flour. The fillings can vary from region to region. The round shape of the rice dumplings symbolizes "reunion".

    "Fish" in Chinese sounds similar to the character for "prosperity", symbolizing an abundant and comfortable life. Most families would have fish on their New Year's Eve dinner.

    One of the representative dishes of Huaiyang cuisine, it has a lucky connotation from its name.

    A regular dish in southern China, the magnificent and auspicious poon choi contains up to 20 luxury ingredients served in a big wooden or clay-pot bowl.

    The eight treasure rice cake is a quintessential Chinese New Year dessert. Many families across the nation would choose to finish their meal with this dessert.

    Those in South China's Sichuan province may choose to have a meal of hot pot on their New Year Eve's dinner. As everyone eats from the same pot, it is also a symbol of reunion.

    During less economically developed times, people often had to wait a full year to enjoy a dish of meat. Braised pork, or hong shao rou in Chinese, is part of a mouthwatering memory of New Year's Eve dinner for many Chinese of the older generation.

    This is a soup that is popular in South China. It uses luxurious ingredients, such as sea cucumber, abalone, shark's fin, dried scallops, ham and more. Its name comes from the tantalizing scent of the soup, enough to lure a Buddha, who is vegetarian, to want to jump over the wall and drink it.

    Most people in South China would have rice cakes for Spring Festival for its auspicious meaning: Wishing to be elevated (in whatever area one desires) in the new year.

    Lettuce, or shengcai in Chinese, sounds similar to the Chinese phrase "gaining fortune". It is not hard to see why people across the nation would opt for this vegetable dish.

    The Chinese pronunciation for tofu sounds similar to "luck for all".