The Dragon Boat Festival predates and extends beyond the Qu Yuan story in the view of many scholars of Chinese folk religion, who point to older midsummer customs, warding off disease and evil influence at the point in the year when the fifth lunar month was traditionally considered dangerous for health, using items such as realgar wine, calamus and mugwort hung at doorways, alongside the dragon boat races themselves, which some accounts tie to dragon worship and rainmaking rites rather than to any single historical death.
The Qu Yuan narrative, whichever its precise age, became the story most widely attached to the festival by the medieval period and remains overwhelmingly the account told and taught today, giving zongzi its meaning as a food specifically thrown to a drowned poet's spirit rather than as a general seasonal dish. Regional zongzi vary considerably, savory versions filled with pork, salted egg yolk or mushroom are common in southern China, while sweeter versions filled with red bean paste or jujube are more common in the north, and the shape itself varies from a simple pyramid to long tapered cylinders depending on the region and the leaves available, but the shared act of steaming or boiling rice wrapped tightly in leaves, and the shared date on the lunar calendar, hold the wide regional variation together as one festival food.