Cured food is served as every year's Spring Festival reunion cuisine. (Photo/Xinhua)

Cured meat is served as every year's Spring Festival reunion cuisine. With the Spring Festival approaching, many villagers in Lvtian town (吕田镇) of Guangzhou city, are busy sun-drying all kinds of cured food in front of or behind their houses, including cured meat, cured sausages, cured duck, etc. The drifting aroma of all the cured food creates a special rural scenery filled with festival atmosphere.

People seem to have "smelt" the fragrance of the Spring Festival through all the pleasant-smelling cured meat. (Photo/Xinhua)

A photo of a villager preparing cured food. (Photo/Xinhua)

There are various kinds of cured food, including cured meat, cured duck, cured sausages and so on. (Photo/Xinhua)

People start to stock up necessary provisions for the Spring Festival since the Little New Year (Chinese: Xiaonian 小年), usually a week before the lunar New Year. People in northern China celebrating it on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, and people in southern China celebrating it on the twenty-fourth.

Arrays of cured meat are arranged neatly by bamboo poles in the sun-drying field drifting with aroma. (Photo/Xinhua)

Everything needed to make offerings to the ancestors, entertain guests, and feed the family over the long holiday must be purchased in advance.

Before setting out to the market, a Spring Festival shopping list must be made, including items such as meat, poultry and eggs, fruit and vegetables, rice and flour, cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, and tea, red paper, images of celestial horses and the Kitchen God. Incense and candles, snacks, new calendars, and toys must also be purchased. Not to be forgotten are new clothes for children and firecrackers to welcome in the New Year.

 (Photo/Xinhua)

After Spring Festival provisions have been brought home, it's time to make further preparations for the holiday. These preparations may include preparing meat, packing blood sausages, and steaming New Year's sticky rice cakes. 

Source: China Daily, Xinhua

Editor: Annie