Spring rolls' New Year symbolism is the most visually immediate of any festival food: pull a freshly fried spring roll from the oil, and you hold something that gleams gold — the exact color of wealth, of ingots, of the treasure associated with New Year prosperity wishes. Place a platter of them on the table and you have, quite literally, arranged a display of golden bars.

The name reinforces the connection: spring rolls are named for the Start of Spring (立春, lì chūn), the solar term that marks the first day of spring on the traditional Chinese calendar. Eating them celebrates the arrival of spring — renewal, new growth, and the beginning of the agricultural year. At New Year, spring rolls embody both the gold of wealth and the freshness of new beginnings.

The direct ancestor of the spring roll is the spring pancake (春饼, chūn bǐng) — a thin, soft wheat flour pancake eaten during the Start of Spring festival in northern China. People would fill these pancakes with fresh spring vegetables just emerging from the soil after winter: bean sprouts, leeks, garlic shoots, young greens. Eating these vegetables on the first day of spring was a celebration of nature's renewal and a ritual welcoming of the season.

Over time, the thin pancake wrapper was filled, rolled, and fried — creating the crispy spring roll that spread throughout China and, through trade and diaspora, across Southeast Asia and the world. Each regional adaptation — Vietnam's bánh cuốn and chả giò, the Philippines' lumpia, Indonesia's lumpia semarang — represents a unique evolution of this ancient spring celebration food.

The spring roll family is extraordinarily diverse. Chinese spring rolls typically feature a thin, crispy wheat wrapper filled with pork, cabbage, mushroom, bamboo shoots, and glass noodles — delicate, refined, and deeply savory. Cantonese dim sum spring rolls are smaller and more precisely folded, served alongside other small plates. Shanghai spring rolls are larger, thicker-skinned, and often vegetarian.

Vietnamese chả giò are wrapped in rice paper and fried until shatteringly crisp, typically served cold with fresh herbs, lettuce cups, and nước chấm dipping sauce — lighter and more aromatic than their Chinese cousins. Filipino lumpia come in endless varieties: fresh (lumpiang sariwa), fried (lumpiang Shanghai), sweet (turon). Each culture has made the spring roll entirely its own while keeping the fundamental gesture — rolled, filled, golden — intact.