Chinese Festivals - Dragon Boat Festival

Dragon Boat Festival falls on May 5. It was in memory of an ancient patriot and poet named Chu Yuan (Wut Yoon). The story occurred in about 300 B.C., about the era of Alexander the Great, in a southern kingdom called Choo in Long River Valley. Chu was very loyal and sincere to his king. But his king did not favor him. Instead, Chu was demoted and exiled. He devoted all his time to writing poetry. Those writings were full of compassion, emotion, and innermost personal feeling. The style, vocabulary and arrangement were beautiful and became a distinctive style and class by itself, called Tze.

Example:

It means: "Everybody is dirty. I am the only one clean. Everybody is drunk. I am the only one sober and awake. Those waters in the ocean and sea if clean, I can use it to clean my clean hat. Those waters in the ocean and sea if dirty, I can use it to clean my dirty feet."

He was the first great poet in Chinese history. After completing his writings, he drowned himself in his native Mee Lor River. People loved him. They all went out to the river on boats, and made every effort to recover his body. They made noise, beating the gongs, utensils or whatever available. The purpose was to frighten the water ghosts and devils so they would not snap Wut Yoon's body away. They made pastries of sticky rice, wrapped and cooked in special dry leaves, tied them with colorful strings and threads, and dropped those pastries deep into the river. The purpose was to bait and lure all fish away so they would not eat up Wut Yoon's body. That day was May 5th.

 That was the true origin of the Dragon Boat Festival. It was not only observed in Wut Yoon's native place, it soon spread throughout the country, until this very day. The festival was a day of good eating and water sport. The sticky rice pastry was about the size of a fist. It usually contained salty egg yolk, ham or bacon, peanut, black eye bean, etc. It was cooked by slow boiling. The special leaf-wrap allowed the moisture to penetrate into the rice, and trapped the flavor inside. It is delicious. We can buy this pastry in Chinatown in any American city, almost all year long.*

Water sports include various classes of boat racing, boat show, or simply a leisure ride on a boat. Boat racing was somewhat like Oxford-Cambridge contest**, except we used gong as rhythm control. Imagine gongs of different sizes from different boats, the unison callings from the participants and the spectators. It was beautiful music and wonderful sound. Imagine the colorful costume of different teams, the competitive decoration of different boats, plus the excitement and the color of the crowd, their dresses, their umbrellas. It was quite a sight.  

 *I believe the Chinese pastry called "joong" (Cantonese) or "zongzi" (Mandarin) are also known as Chinese tamales.

**I am pretty sure he means the English-style regattas, or rowing competitions.