Overflowing piles of oranges, tangerines and kumquats in street markets and homes epitomise Lunar New Year in Hong Kong. In Cantonese, the common tangerine or mandarin orange (Citrus reticulata) is known as kam – a homophone for gold.
While the bright-orange hue symbolises the desirability of personal wealth as represented by gold, the juicy-firm texture, and characteristic citrus taste, a mixture of robust sour-sweetness, are attributes without which human life has little savour.
Several decades ago, almost all imported California or Florida oranges were used for ritual purposes; relatively few such fruit were eaten.
For more than 1,000 years, Guangdong province’s Teochew (Chiuchow) region has been famed for high-quality, distinctively flavoured oranges. And like its people – prolific emigrants since the 18th century – oranges sourced from their ancestral homeland were exported across Southeast Asia and beyond in time for seasonal festivities.
Agricultural areas around Swatow (modern Shantou) were renowned for Hong Jiang (“Red River”) sweet oranges; this variety is most closely comparable to Valencia cultivars grown commercially in Australia, South Africa and Israel.
Thin-skinned and full of seeds, Hong Jiang oranges appear in local street markets for only a month or so in February and March, and then that is that for another year.
As prolonged refrigerated sea-freight and air-cargo shipments steadily eliminate genuine seasonality among today’s ever more interconnected, globally sourced food items, Hong Jiang oranges remain an annually anticipated seasonal treat for those who enjoy them.
Those who find that their own inner workings susceptible to leung foodstuffs will not eat them at all.
On a more helpful digestive note, partygoers left bilious and out-of-sorts by too many oil-rich, meat-heavy, stodgy Lunar New Year favourites often find an annual overconsumption of citrus fruits a useful, timely seasonal corrective.
The Hong Kong kumquat (Citrus hindsii) is known locally as kut; a general Cantonese homophone for luck. This, in turn, provides for another widely used homophone – Dai Kut Lai See (loosely, “Great Luck and Good Fortune”).
Grown in vast quantities in south China, kumquat trees are imported into Hong Kong in the weeks before the festival. Doused with potent fertilisers and pesticides to encourage fruiting and deep-green leaves, consumption is probably better avoided.
Many Hong Kong families buy new kumquat specimens every year; large trees easily cost several thousand dollars. Even a small one in an earthenware or dark-green Canton-glaze pot emblazoned with dragons and bearing a few dozen fruit and several red envelopes is worth having in one’s home as a hopeful harbinger of better times to come.
Few households, sadly, bother to keep them alive. Rubbish-collection points across Hong Kong are littered with slowly dying kumquat trees, yanked from their pots, in the weeks after the festival.
