Dragon Boat Festival: Qu Yuan, boat races and zongzi

The Dragon Boat Festival, Duanwu (端午节), falls on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month (五月初五). According to UNESCO, several peoples in China and around the world celebrate it, especially in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze.

The name works like this. 端 means "beginning": 端五 is the "beginning five", the 5th of the month (others take 端 to mean "upright, exact"). As for 午, in ancient usage it stood for 五, "five", the two characters often being pronounced the same; in the count of the earthly branches, the fifth month is also the "wu month" (午月). Duanwu is therefore the festival of the fifth day of the fifth month, hence one of its other names, "Double Fifth" (重五 or 重午). It is also called Duanyang (端阳).

The oldest attestation of the name, according to Chinese Wikipedia, is in the Fengtu ji (风土记) of Zhou Chu (周处), a writer of the Jin dynasty, who explains that 端 means "beginning". Scholars disagree on which form came first, 端五 or 端午.

The best-known origin is a story of mourning. Qu Yuan (屈原), poet and statesman of the kingdom of Chu (楚), was born around 339 BCE and died in 278 BCE, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica: in despair, he drowned himself in the Miluo River (汨罗江), in today's Hunan. Britannica adds that the festival began as a search for his body. To this day, UNESCO notes, the poet is venerated in Hubei and Hunan during the festival.

According to Chinese Wikipedia, the first text that links Qu Yuan to the fifth day of the fifth month is much later (English Wikipedia dates the link to the early Han): the Xu Qi Xie ji (续齐谐记) of Wu Jun (吴均), a collection of strange tales from the Liang (梁) dynasty. Qu Yuan, it says, threw himself into the Miluo on the fifth day of the fifth month; in mourning, the people of Chu threw rice into the water in bamboo tubes on that day every year.

The same book tells what came next, which explains zongzi. Under the Han, a man named Ou Hui (欧回), from Changsha, sees a figure appear in broad daylight who says he is Qu Yuan. The offerings, he says, are being stolen by a dragon (蛟龙): they should be covered with chinaberry leaves (楝) and tied with five-coloured silk thread, two things dragons fear. Hence, the text concludes, zongzi tied with five-coloured silk. Chinese Wikipedia sees it as a story spun later to explain zongzi, and it is not the only origin on offer.

Qu Yuan is not the festival's only hero. In southeastern Jiangsu, people honour Wu Zixu (伍子胥) instead, and in northeastern Zhejiang, the young Cao E (曹娥).

According to Chinese Wikipedia, the oldest text mentioning a god being welcomed on the fifth day of the fifth month is the Cao E stele (曹娥碑), written under the Eastern Han by Handan Chun (邯郸淳): it speaks of welcoming "Lord Wu", that is, Wu Zixu. In the Wu (吴) region, the boat races were held to welcome Wu Zixu, who had become a river god, and had nothing to do with Qu Yuan. As for Cao E, tradition says that in 143 her father, Cao Xu, fell into the Shun River while leading a ceremony for Wu Zixu on the festival day, and that the girl, out of filial piety, searched the river for him.

The modern poet and scholar Wen Yiduo (闻一多) put forward another explanation in his study "Duanwu kao" (端午考): many of the festival's customs revolve around the dragon. Duanwu, he argued, began as a festival of the Wu and Yue peoples of the lower Yangtze, who worshipped the dragon as a totem, and it existed before Qu Yuan died. Others see in it an old agricultural festival of the south, linked to rice growing. Some modern research suggests that the stories of Qu Yuan or Wu Zixu were grafted onto older traditions.

The dragon boat races (赛龙舟) give the festival its English name. A standard dragon boat carries twenty-two people: twenty paddlers sitting in pairs, a drummer at the bow facing them, and a steerer standing at the stern. The drum sets the pace, since the whole crew must paddle exactly in time; its beat is sometimes called the boat's "heartbeat". The bow and stern are carved as a dragon's head and tail. A ceremony called the "awakening of the dragon" consists of painting the eyes on the dragon's head to "awaken" it.

The other ritual takes place in the kitchen: people make and eat zongzi (粽子) with family and friends. These are pyramids of glutinous rice with a filling, wrapped in bamboo leaves, sometimes reed leaves. Tastes vary by region. In the north they tend to be sweet, with red bean paste, jujubes or nuts. In the south they are mostly savoury, with pork belly, salted duck egg, ham or shiitake mushrooms.

The fifth lunar month was considered an unlucky, "poisonous" month (恶月), and its fifth day even more so: it is midsummer, epidemics spread, and venomous creatures were said to come out from that day on. Many of the festival's customs are therefore about protection. People hang calamus (菖蒲), mugwort (艾草) and garlic above their doors, whose smell and shape are believed to drive evil away. UNESCO also mentions bathing in flower-scented water and wearing five-coloured silk threads.

Another custom is realgar wine (雄黄酒): yellow rice wine (huangjiu) with powdered realgar added, a mineral that is an arsenic sulfide. Traditional Chinese medicine saw realgar as an antidote to poison, protecting against disease, snakes and evil spirits; it was put on children's faces to keep away the "five poisonous creatures".

Realgar wine also features in a famous scene of the Legend of the White Snake. On the day of Duanwu, on the advice of the monk Fahai, Xu Xian has his wife, Bai Suzhen, drink realgar wine, and she turns back into her true form: a great white snake.

Like Qingming and the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival has been a public holiday in mainland China since 2008, following a State Council decision of December 2007. In 2009 UNESCO inscribed the "Dragon Boat festival" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Its description mentions sacrifices to a local hero, dragon boat races, willow shooting, feasts of zongzi and eggs, opera, songs and unicorn dances.

What do people wish each other? In recent years a debate has run across the Chinese internet: should one say "Happy Duanwu" (端午节快乐) or "Peace and health at Duanwu" (端午安康)? Supporters of 安康 point to Qu Yuan's death and the unlucky month: mugwort, realgar wine and scented baths were meant to ward off disease. The linguistics blog Language Log, at the University of Pennsylvania, saw it as a case of "moral abduction" (道德绑架).

Folklorists interviewed by Guangming Online (光明网) or China News Service say both greetings are fine: old texts also speak of celebrating Duanwu joyfully. A Shanghai rumour-checking platform even traced the "only 安康" rule to its source: an online article from about ten years earlier that quoted an "expert" who does not exist.