两千三百年前的粽子，从两座楚墓里挖了出来。一批素的，一批有肉——荤素之争比屈原还老。

Start with a story everyone knows.

A very long time ago there was a man called Qu Yuan, and he threw himself into a river.

The people by the river were afraid the fish would bite his body, so they wrapped rice up and threw it into the water.

And that is why, every Duanwu, Chinese people eat zongzi.

You and I have heard this since we were small.

This year, archaeologists put a very large question to it.

The question is not "is the story true".

The question is "which came first, zongzi or Qu Yuan".

Look at two tombs.

The first is at Xinyang in Henan, opened in 2015.

In the rear chamber lay forty packages of something, one after another, wrapped very neatly.

The second is at Huainan in Anhui, called Wuwangdun, opened in 2024.

It is the largest and highest-ranking Chu tomb excavated so far; the occupant was a king of Chu.

In its eastern chamber: more than two hundred packages.

Both tombs are Chu, and they are about a hundred years apart.

Open them and look: leaves, wrapped around grain.

Step one is to ask: what kind of leaf is this?

That step is not easy, because the leaves lay underground for two thousand three hundred years.

The researchers extracted ancient DNA from the leaves and compared it against living trees.

The answer came back: oak leaf.

Oak is a kind of tree; its leaves are large, thick and tough — exactly right for wrapping things.

Step two is to ask: what is inside?

In the first tomb: unhusked millet and rice.

Note those two words — "unhusked".

Grain that still has its husk on cannot be eaten directly by a person.

Which tells us it was never a meal for the living. It was an offering.

The second tomb was a completely different matter.

The researchers measured animal fat inside them.

Which is to say: that package had meat in it.

So two thousand three hundred years ago, zongzi had already split into two kinds.

One vegetarian, one with meat.

The very thing Chinese people argue about most fiercely online — whether meat belongs in a zongzi — turns out to have been running for two thousand three hundred years.

Now back to the first question: which came first?

The first tomb dates to roughly 339 to 329 BC.

At that time, Qu Yuan was still a child.

His leap into the river came many years later.

And the earliest book that puts zongzi and Qu Yuan together is called Xu Qi Xie Ji, a Southern Dynasties text — later again by more than seven hundred years.

Put those three dates side by side and it becomes clear.

First there was the food.

A long time later, there was the man.

A long time after that, there was the story that joined them.

This is not to say the legend is false.

A legend does something else: it gives an old thing that already exists a reason you can remember.

A great many customs grow this way — first you do it, and much later there is an explanation.

And there is one last detail, which I think is the most moving part of all of it.

Around Ruzhou in Henan, people still wrap zongzi in oak leaves today.

Put a Ruzhou oak-leaf zongzi beside the one taken out of the Wuwangdun tomb, and they are almost the same object.

Between them, two thousand three hundred years, and one dynasty after another.

One person laid a package of oak-leaf zongzi in a king’s tomb.

Two thousand three hundred years later, another person in a kitchen wrapped one almost exactly like it.

Think about it: is there something in your family that nobody can quite explain, but that everyone keeps doing?