The Origin and Customs of Dragon Boat Festival

Dragon Boat Festival is the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, also known as Duanyang Festival, Noon Festival, May Festival, May Festival, Ai Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Noon Festival, Noon Festival and Summer Festival. It was originally a festival to drive away the plague in summer. It is said that the custom of eating zongzi and racing dragon boats on the Dragon Boat Festival is to commemorate Qu Yuan, a great poet in the history of China. It is precisely because of this that the Dragon Boat Festival was named "Poet's Day" after liberation. Qu Yuan is one of the greatest romantic poets in China, and also the earliest known famous poet and world cultural celebrity in China. He initiated the style of "Chu Ci" and the tradition of "vanilla beauty". His representative works include Li Sao and Nine Songs.

custom

Dragon Boat Racing

Dragon boat race is the main custom of Dragon Boat Festival. Legend has it that it originated in ancient times. Chu people are reluctant to give up their saint Qu Yuan and die by throwing themselves into the river. Many people rowed to catch the rescue. They scrambled to catch up with Dongting Lake and disappeared. After that, I will row a dragon boat on May 5th every year to commemorate it. People use dragon boats to disperse the fish in the river so as not to eat Qu Yuan's body. The habit of competition prevailed in wuyue and Chu.

Eat brown on Dragon Boat Festival

Eating zongzi on Dragon Boat Festival is another traditional custom of China people. Zongzi is also eaten on Dragon Boat Festival to commemorate Qu Yuan. Usually it is wrapped the day before, cooked at night and eaten in the morning. The traditional form of zongzi is a triangle, which is generally named after the inner pulp. Glutinous rice dumplings are called zongzi, adzuki bean dumplings are called adzuki bean dumplings, and jujube dumplings are called jujube dumplings, which are collectively called glutinous rice dumplings.

Peixiangnang

Children wear sachets on the Dragon Boat Festival, which is said to ward off evil spirits and avoid disasters (people in ancient times thought that they got sick because of monsters). Actually, it is used to decorate the inner head. There are cinnabar, realgar and fragrant medicine in the sachet, which are wrapped in silk cloth and tied into a string with five-color silk thread. They are small and lovely in different shapes. In some southern cities of China, young men and women also use them.

Hanging wormwood

There is a folk proverb that says, "Willows are inserted in Qingming Festival, and Ai is inserted in Dragon Boat Festival". On the Dragon Boat Festival, people regard inserting wormwood and calamus as one of the important contents. Every household should clean the courtyard, put calamus and moxa sticks in the door eyebrows and hang them in the hall, and make them into human or tiger shapes with calamus, mugwort leaves, pomegranate flowers, garlic and dragon boat flowers, which are called Ai Ren and Ai Hu; It is made into garlands and decorations, beautiful and fragrant, and women compete to wear it to ward off evil spirits.

Diaozhong statue

It is the custom of the Dragon Boat Festival for Zhong Kui to catch ghosts. In the Jianghuai area, every household hangs a statue of Zhong Kui in the town house to ward off evil spirits. When Emperor Kaiyuan of Tang Dynasty returned to the palace from Lishan, malaria was rampant and he dreamed of ghosts of one big and one small. After the imp stole Yang Guifei's sachet and the Jade Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, GREAT GHOST caught the imp, gouged out his eyes and swallowed it in one gulp. Ming Taizu asked and said, "My surname is Zhong Kui, that is to say, my martial arts is not so good. I am willing to exorcise demons for your majesty. " . After Ming Taizu woke up, malaria was cured, so the painter Wu Daozi drew a picture of Zhong Kui catching ghosts according to what he saw in his dream, and ordered all people to post it on the Dragon Boat Festival to drive away evil spirits.

Hang wallets and colorful silk threads

In ancient China, five colors were revered and regarded as auspicious colors. Therefore, in the early morning of the festival, the first important thing for adults after getting up is to tie five-color lines on their wrists, ankles and necks. It is said that children wearing five-color thread can avoid the harm of snakes and scorpions; Throwing it into the river is to let the river wash away plagues and diseases and make children safe and healthy.

Point realgar wine

Realgar is also a kind of medicinal material, which is said to kill all kinds of poisons. Therefore, during the Dragon Boat Festival, Shaanxi people will soak realgar in wine and put realgar wine on children's ears, nose, forehead, wrists and ankles. It is said that this practice can keep mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, centipedes, geckos and spiders away from the body.

Eat five poisonous cakes and draw five poisonous pictures.

The five poisons refer to toads, snakes, centipedes, scorpions and geckos. On this day, people print five kinds of poisonous insects on cakes and eat them on the same day to avoid the plague brought by these poisonous insects. The five-poison map is to let the bugs think they are the same kind after seeing it, go straight away and never come near this family again.

The origin of the Dragon Boat Festival

Dragon Boat Festival originated from the worship of astronomical phenomena and evolved from the ancient Dragon Boat Festival. On the midsummer Dragon Boat Festival, the black dragon spent seven nights in the sky, which is the day of the dragonfly. As the fifth poem in The Book of Changes and the Melon says, "The dragon is in the sky". At noon, Long Xing is both a "win" and a "right" and a symbol of good luck.

Dragon Boat Festival, originally founded by ancestors in the south, is a festival to worship the ancestors of dragons. 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 "Dragon Ascending to Heaven" as an auspicious day to worship the dragon ancestors, and injected the seasonal fashion of "eliminating diseases and preventing epidemics" in summer. Dragon Boat Festival is considered as an "evil moon day", which originated in the northern part of the Central Plains to commemorate Qu Yuan and other historical figures. The formation of the Dragon Boat Festival custom can be said to be the product of the integration of North and South customs.