What it is
Taiwan's Indigenous peoples make leaf-wrapped parcels of grain and meat that outsiders often call millet zongzi (小米粽). The two best known are cinavu (吉拿富), a long savoury roll of the Paiwan, Rukai and Puyuma, and abai (阿拜 or 阿粨), made from ground millet with a denser, rice-cake texture. Both usually hold pork.
Where it came from
Millet was a main grain for many Indigenous communities. Before wet rice spread under Japanese rule, it supplied roughly half of their staple food, more than taro, sweet potato or upland rice. Grain wrapped round meat made a portable meal for hunting trips and field work, and the parcels also belong to seasonal rites.
They have no link to the Han Chinese Dragon Boat Festival, though vendors have sold them as Paiwan zongzi (排灣粽) or Indigenous zongzi (原住民粽). In 2026 Tainan mayor Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) said the zongzi label oversimplifies the food and invites misunderstanding, and his city began promoting the name cinavu instead.
The grain itself has retreated. Mirror Media reports that Taitung once grew about 6,000 hectares of millet and now grows around 50.
How it is made
The base is foxtail millet, glutinous rice or taro flour, spread round a strip of pork, often fatty belly. For cinavu, this commonly goes first into the leaves of jiasuanjiang (假酸漿), a wild herb, then into shell-ginger (月桃) leaves, and the roll is tied with plant fibre. It is then boiled or steamed. Abai uses finely ground millet, so it cooks into a denser, more cohesive cake.
How to eat it
Served at celebrations, weddings and gatherings, and offered to honoured guests. Peel off the outer shell-ginger leaf; the inner herb leaf is eaten with the filling. Outside Indigenous villages, look for cinavu (吉拿富) or abai (阿拜) at Indigenous restaurants.
Around Taiwan
- Tainan
- Before the 2026 Dragon Boat Festival, Tainan's city government served cinavu at a municipal meeting to push the Paiwan name over 'zongzi'. It said its Tabe Zahamu Leyuan (Tabe札哈木樂原) Indigenous cultural site would sell it year-round.
- Kaohsiung
- Ibu Kitchen (阿香的廚房) in Meinong is run by a Bunun chef who moved down from the mountains after Typhoon Morakot in 2009. Its millet dumpling is soft and chewy, full of meat and the savour of sakura shrimp.
- Central
- In Taichung, the Indigenous restaurant Gulu Gulu serves a Paiwan-style abai.
- South
- In Pingtung, abai is ground millet, sweet or savoury, filled with pork or peanut powder and wrapped in shell-ginger or banana leaf. Cinavu is long and only savoury. Taro versions go into jiasuanjiang leaves, then silver grass; millet or rice versions go straight into shell ginger.
- East
- Paiwan singer A-Bao (阿爆) names a-vai (阿粨) as one of her breakfasts at her family home in Taitung, where her mother kept it in the fridge as a standby.
