Dragon Boat Festival

The story most commonly told about the Dragon Boat Festival concerns Qu Yuan, a poet and minister at the court of the state of Chu during the Warring States period. Exiled after his counsel against alliance with the rival state of Qin went unheeded, tradition holds that he composed some of the earliest and most celebrated poetry in the Chinese literary tradition during his years away from court, work later gathered into the anthology known as the Chu Ci. When Chu fell to Qin forces in 278 BCE, Qu Yuan is said to have drowned himself in the Miluo River in despair at his homeland's defeat.

Local people, tradition continues, raced out in boats to search the river for his body, an action remembered in the dragon boat races that give the festival its English name, and threw rice wrapped in leaves into the water to keep fish and river spirits from consuming his remains, a practice remembered in the zongzi eaten at the festival today. Qu Yuan's story gave the older festival a patriotic and literary focus it had not originally carried, and he is honored elsewhere in Chinese culture as a founding figure of poetry as well as a model of loyal remonstrance against a ruler who would not listen.

Scholars of Chinese religion generally treat the Qu Yuan narrative as a later attachment to a festival whose customs are considerably older than his fourth century BCE date. The fifth day of the fifth lunar month falls near the summer solstice, a point in the agricultural and seasonal calendar that early Chinese communities marked as dangerous, associated with rising heat, disease, and the emergence of the five poisonous creatures of folk tradition, the snake, scorpion, centipede, toad and spider. Rites recorded from as early as the Han dynasty describe hanging mugwort and calamus at doorways, drinking realgar wine, and other apotropaic measures aimed at protecting the household through the seasonal transition, independent of any connection to a drowned poet.

Regional legends elsewhere in China attach the same date and the same boat races to other figures entirely, including the loyal minister Wu Zixu in parts of the lower Yangtze region, which is itself evidence that the festival's customs predate any single explanatory story and later absorbed several different local heroes as its dominant popular meaning shifted region by region and century by century. Some regional traditions also tie the day to Wu Zixu of the state of Wu, a loyal minister forced to suicide by his own king and, in one version of the story, thrown into the river afterward, folding a second wronged statesman into a festival whose core concern with danger, water and the turn of the seasons predates either man's story.