The custom, origin and legend of Dragon Boat Festival

The customs of the Dragon Boat Festival mainly include dragon boat picking, Dragon Boat Festival, herb picking, hanging wormwood and calamus, ancestor worship, washing herbal water, drinking water at noon, soaking in dragon boats, eating zongzi, flying kites, tying colorful silk thread, smoking Atractylodes lancea and wearing sachets.

Dragon Boat Festival is a very popular folk festival in China. This is a traditional custom of the Chinese nation since ancient times. Due to the vast territory and numerous stories and legends, not only many different festival names have been produced, but also different customs have been observed in different places. The Dragon Boat Festival in midsummer is an auspicious day for Feilong. Dragon Boat Festival in the form of dragon boat race is an important theme of Dragon Boat Festival, which is still popular in the southern coastal areas of China. In addition, a series of Dragon Boat Festival customs are derived from numbers of yin and yang and seasons. According to the number of yin and yang, noon is yang, and heavy noon is the most yang. The ancients regarded three o'clock in the afternoon and three o'clock in the afternoon as the most important time to eliminate evil spirits. The ancients also regarded the Dragon Boat Festival as an auspicious year, which coincided with the summer solstice, and called it "Dragon Boat Festival", which is said to be "once in a blue moon". Summer is a season of struggle between yin and yang. Yang goes up and Yin is forced down. In the afternoon, the yang is healthy and the yin is afraid of evil. Summer is also the season to drive away the plague. In midsummer, the Dragon Boat Festival is full of yang, and everything is thriving at this time. It is the strongest day of Chinese herbal medicine in a year. Herbs collected during the Dragon Boat Festival are the most effective in eliminating diseases and preventing diseases. Due to the gathering of pure yang and healthy qi in the world at noon and the magical characteristics of herbs on this day, many Dragon Boat Festival customs handed down from ancient times have the contents of eliminating yin and evil, eliminating diseases and epidemic prevention, such as hanging wormwood, drinking water at noon, soaking in dragon boat water, tying five-color silk thread to ward off evil spirits, washing herbal water, smoking Atractylodes rhizome to eliminate diseases and epidemic prevention and so on.

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.

According to legend, Qu Yuan advocated using talents and empowering people to make them rich, and urged them to unite against Qin, which was strongly opposed by others. Qu Yuan was deposed, expelled from the capital, and exiled to the Yuan and Xiang river basins. During his exile, he wrote poems such as Li Sao, Tian Wen, Jiu Ge and so on, which were concerned about the country and the people. In 278 BC, Qin Jun invaded Kyoto, Chu. Qu Yuan was heartbroken to see his motherland being invaded, but he was reluctant to give up his motherland. On May 5th, after he wrote his last poem "Huai Sha", he plunged into the Miluo River and wrote a magnificent patriotic movement with his own life. After Qu Yuan threw himself into the river, the local people immediately rowed for help after hearing the news ..... but Qu Yuan's body was never found. In order to mourn, people rowed on rivers, and later it gradually developed into a dragon boat race. People were afraid that fish in the river would eat his body, so they went home and threw rice balls into the river to prevent fish and shrimp from ruining Qu Yuan's body. Later, eating zongzi became a custom.