Duanwu Festival: Welcome to Summer!
This weekend is the Chinese traditional Duanwu festival. The festival is on the fifth day of the fifth month in Chinese traditional calendar. As it is the beginning of midsummer, it is also called the Summer Festival.
There are many stories about the origin of this festival. The most popular version says that the festival is in memory of Qu Yuan, a great poet in Chinese history. Qu Yuan lived in the Warring States Period (475 BC - 221 BC). When his motherland, Chu State was conquered by Qin State, the highly revered poet was so sad that he jumped into a big river and drowned himself. Though the local people hurriedly rowed boats to attempt a rescue, they could not find Qu Yuan’s body. For fear that fish in the river might eat his body, they wrapped rice with reed leaves and threw them into the river to feed the fish. As time went on, it has become customs to hold a Long-shaped boat race and make rice dumplings on that day.
However, some scholars believe that Duanwu Festival has an earlier origin than Qu Yuan. Some of the practices on the festival day cannot be explained by the Qu Yuan story. For instance, people would gather herbs in the fields, hang leaves at their doors, and take bath in herb-soaking water. From today’s point of view, these customs are healthy habits. As summer comes, it is getting hotter and wetter. Morbigenous bugs and germs breed quickly. The anti-pest herbs are very helpful to prevent diseases.
Other customs are for luck and decoration. People would use herbal leaves to weave a tiger-shaped toy and carry it with them. For children, people would use realgar wine as ink and write the Chinese word for “king” on their forehead, because the tiger also has the word “king” on its forehead. The Chinese adore the tiger very much, believing that the tiger is the king of all animals, so it can protect people and drive away the vermin. Of course, it is actually the herbs and realgar that do the job of vermin repelling.
There are many other customs for the Summer Festival, but pitifully, most of them are no longer practiced in China.
As Japanese culture was deeply influenced by China, the Duanwu Festival also made its way to Japan. However, the Japanese no longer use the Chinese traditional calender and has adopted the Gregorian calendar, so they celebrate the festival on May the 5th. Nonetheless, the customs remain largely the same.
The Japanese pictures are from here.
Korea was also influenced by the Chinese culture in many ways. They have adopted the Duanwu customs fairly well. The Koreans even applied to UNESCO’s World Intangible Cultural Heritage Center for an inclusion of their Duanwu customs. This is a big sarcasm to the Chinese, who seem to have too many heritages and too little attention on them.
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