Dragon boat festival keeps the beast at bay

Dragon boat festival keeps the beast at bay

Traditional Chinese festivals always have their symbolic foods. The Dragon Boat Festival - or Duanwu Festival - features zongzi, or sticky rice dumplings.

There is always a core idea behind each festival. For the Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, getting rid of disease, avoiding disasters and wishing for good health are the core ideas.

Wen Yiduo (1899-1946), a poet and academic, wrote that on the fifth day of the fifth month, people threw rice dumplings into the water and raced the dragon boats - activities expressing awe of the dragon below and the hope that it will not make trouble in the days to come.

Besides racing dragon boats, people also hang sweet sedge and wormwood on their front doors, drink realgar wine and make pouches filled with herbs, all customs to get rid of evil spirits.

The history of the Duanwu Festival dates to the Warring States Period (475-221 BC). The most widely known story of Duanwu in contemporary China is that it was started to remember Qu Yuan, a patriotic official from the state of Chu (today's Hubei province) who committed suicide on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. People rowed a boat to find him but failed, so they threw sticky rice dumplings into the river so the dragon underwater would not eat his body.