What does Dragon Boat Festival mean?

Dragon Boat Festival is one of the four traditional festivals in China, which is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. According to legend, Qu Yuan, an ancient patriotic poet, committed suicide by jumping into the Miluo River on May 5, and later generations designated this day as a festival to commemorate him. The main significance of this festival is to inherit and carry forward the intangible culture of China. The Dragon Boat Festival has integrated a variety of folk customs in its historical development and evolution. There are many customs of Dragon Boat Festival, with various forms, rich and colorful contents, and lively and festive. Due to different regional cultures, the content or details of customs vary from place to place in China.

The Dragon Boat Festival, also known as Duanyang Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Zhengyang Festival and Tianzhong Festival, originated from the worship of astronomical phenomena in ancient times and evolved from the Dragon Boat Festival. On the midsummer Dragon Boat Festival, the black dragon rises to the south of the sky for seven nights, which is an auspicious day for the dragon to fly. As the fifth poem in the Book of Changes says, "The dragon is in the sky". At noon, Long Xing is both a "win" and a "right" and a symbol of good luck. Its origin covers ancient astrological culture, humanistic philosophy and other aspects, and contains profound and rich cultural connotations; In the process of inheritance and development, a variety of folk customs are integrated, and festival customs are rich in content. Picking dragon boats and eating zongzi are two major customs of the Dragon Boat Festival, which have been passed down in China since ancient times and have never stopped. Dragon Boat Festival was originally founded by the ancestors of southern wuyue, to worship the ancestors of dragons and pray for evil spirits. It is said that Qu Yuan, a poet of Chu State in the Warring States Period, jumped into the Miluo River on May 5th and committed suicide. Later, people also took the Dragon Boat Festival as a festival to commemorate Qu Yuan. There are also sayings in memory of Wu Zixu, Cao E and meson push. Generally speaking, the Dragon Boat Festival originated from the ancient ancestors' choice of "flying dragons over the sky" as an auspicious day to worship their ancestors and pray for evil spirits, and injected the seasonal fashion of "eliminating diseases and preventing epidemics" into summer. The Dragon Boat Festival, regarded as "bad month and bad day", began in the northern part of the Central Plains and was attached to commemorate Qu Yuan and other historical figures.