This practice originally occurred at midwinter for as long as a month, but the hardship this involved led to repeated attempts to ban its observance out of concern for its practitioners.

The usual story for the origin of the Cold Food and Tomb-Sweeping Festivals concerns the 7th-century-BC Jin nobleman Jie Zhitui,[1] a model of self-sacrificing loyalty.

[2] During the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, the Zhou Kingdom began to break up into its constituent parts and their lords gained more and more freedom from central control.

One of them, Li Ji, was of lower status and came from the Rong tribes who lived to China's west, but successfully schemed to become a full wife and to establish her son as the duke's successor.

Her older stepson Ji Chong'er was framed for revolting against the duke in 655 BC, forcing the prince to flee for his life to his mother's family among the Di tribes north of China.

The 4th-century-BC commentary on Confucius's Spring and Autumn Annals traditionally credited to Zuo Qiuming includes a Thucydidean passage where Jie argues with his mother about their future.

Jie credits Heaven with having restored Chong'er to his rightful place and is disgusted by the credit-seeking and job-hunting behavior of his fellows, whom he considers worse than thieves.

When this proves vain, he accepts the situation and sets aside the produce of the fields of "Mëenshang" to endow sacrifices in Jie's honor, "a memento... of my neglect and a mark of distinction for the good man".

It records that the commoners of Taiyuan Commandery avoided using fire in preparing their food for five days around midwinter, upholding this taboo even when they are gravely ill.

[12][9] A biography in the Book of the Later Han relates how the magistrate for Bingzhou (i.e., Taiyuan) found people rich and poor observing a "dragon taboo" against lighting a fire during the month of Jie's death in midwinter, lest they anger his spirit.

The magistrate Zhou Ju (周舉) wrote an oration around AD 130 praising Jie but admonishing the people for a tradition that harmed so many that it could not have been what the sage intended.

[22][23] These prohibitions failed to such an extent that, by the time of Jia Sixie's c. 540 Qimin Yaoshu, a day-long Cold Food Festival had spread across most of China, moved to the day before the Qingming solar term.

[24][25] The Cold Food Festival grew to a three-day period[26][27] and began to incorporate ancestral veneration under the Tang and remained more important than celebrations of the Qingming solar term as late as the Song.

de Groot argued for its origin as a celebration of the sun's "victory" at the vernal equinox, based on a comparative anthropological analysis drawing on Ovid, Macrobius, Lucian, and Epiphanius of Salamis.

[38][39] Claude Lévi-Strauss based his analysis of the festival as a kind of Chinese Lent[40] upon a mistranslation of the relevant passage in the Rites of Zhou by Frazer.

[46] Supposedly, the Mi King was beheaded during a battle with Yao but his body continued to stay atop his horse all the way back to "Wu Village", where he was buried.

[29] In the city of Jiexiu in Shanxi Province, near where Jie died, locals still commemorate the festival, but even there the tradition of eating cold food is no longer practiced.