The Dragon Boat Festival ranks with Lunar New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival as one of the three leading folk celebrations of China. It falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, which occurs on June 12 this year.
The Chinese call this day Tuan Wu Chieh (High Noon Festival) or the Fifth Moon Festival. It is believed that the sun is at its hottest at noon on this day. In the minds of the Chinese, the Dragon Boat Festival marks the start of summer heat.
As with most folk festivals, the original significance is lost in history. But superstitions and legends connected with the day have both romantic and practical connotation.
The dragon boat races are said to commemorate an attempt to save the life of a scholar-statesman and good man named Chu Yuan, who lived from 343 to 290 B.C. Chu Yuan was an official serving under the King of Chu in the time of the Warring States (403-221 B.C.). Incurring the displeasure of the king, he was exiled to what is now Hunan province. For 10 years he lived the life of a hermit and poured out his thoughts and grievances in poetic form.
Chinese families have reunions on Tuan Wu Chieh and eat rice dumplings filled with meat or sea food. (File photo)
On the fifth day of the fifth month of his 10th year of exile, Chu Yuan grew so despondent that he threw himself in the Milo River. Nearby villagers who considered him a worthy man jumped in their boats and sought to save him. But they were too late.
Because Chu Yuan was a poet, the fifth day of the moon is also observed as Poet's Day.
At Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, civic groups sponsor Dragon Boat Festival competitions between rowing teams. The boats are fancifully painted in dragon-scale designs and have carved dragon heads at the prow.
The drowning of Chu Yuan led to another custom of the Dragon Boat Festival. The villagers who were too late to save the poet held a funeral service and threw handfuls of cooked rice into the water to comfort his spirit. Because the fish leapt for the rice as soon as it hit the water, the villagers wrapped the food in bamboo tubes and leaves.
In modern Chinese households, the special food of the day is a glutinous rice concoction filled with sweet bean paste or a mixture of ham and other meats. The rectangular or trapezoid-shape dumplings are wrapped in bamboo leaves.
The practical aspect of the Dragon Boat Festival has to do with the beginning of the hot season. It is customary for housewives to undertake a gigantic housecleaning as protection against the expectable illnesses and diseases of the long hot summer.
Superstition also has it that on this day the five most dreaded "poisonous creatures" (scorpions, spiders, centipedes, lizards, and snakes) go into hiding. Housewives take advantage of the creatures' absence to scatter insecticides around the house. Arsenic sulfide, or realgar, is used to disinfect the premises. A pinch of the chemical also goes into food. The aroma of garlic and camphor will be in the air on this day. Both arc believed effective in warding off germs and pestilence.