What is the difference between the Dragon Boat Festival in China and the Dragon Boat Festival in Korea?

In Korea, the Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, just like the Dragon Boat Festival in China. Dragon Boat Festival in the "Joseon Dynasty" Nam Hyo-woon's "Autumn River Collection" has expressed, "Gangneung Dragon Boat Festival" is now Korea's preserved major Dragon Boat traditional festival customs. Originally, the custom of the Dragon Boat Festival was practiced in many areas of Korea, but it gradually disappeared with the development of society, except for the Gangneung area, where it has been preserved intact, with a history of more than 1,000 years.

The Gangneung Dragon Boat Festival was recognized as an Intangible Cultural Property by Korea in 1967, and since then, the festival has quickly been revived and developed in Korea. Today, the Gangneung Dragon Boat Festival features over 1,000 entertainment programs, including several types of festivals and masquerade dances, as well as farmer's music and dance competitions, pot throwing, wrestling, swinging, kneeling competitions, taekwondo competitions, college soccer matches, and chess tournaments. From the first day of May to the tenth, but also organized a national grand "mess field" (temple fair), the local specialties of goods concentrated on the exhibition and sale of a large scale.

Because the origin of the Dragon Boat Festival and the origin of rice farming, water-related, every year in May of the lunar calendar is the season of rising water, in order to pray that the water will not drown the rice, this time of the year to sacrifice to the gods. In this way, this festival was slowly formed in China. Later, when the farming culture of China spread overseas, the Dragon Boat Festival in Korea was naturally formed under the influence of Chinese culture. As a result, the Korean interpretation of the Dragon Boat Festival is the same as that of the Chinese. For example, Korea also calls the fifth day of the fifth month of May "Chongwu", "Chongwu", "Duanyang", "May Day", and the unique Korean word is "Duanwu". The unique Korean word for "Dragon Boat Festival" is "Jangil," which means the day of the gods. According to traditional custom, on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, people eat "moxa cake" and drink Yiren juice, and women wash their hair with calamus soup or drink calamus water, or put on make-up with calamus dew, which is called "calamus make-up". Residents put vermillion charms on their doorposts to ward off evil spirits. The deities worshipped by Koreans are "Daegwanryeong Mountain God" and Dong (village) Seonghwa, and there are as many as twelve deified figures, such as Kim Yu-shin and the national god of the city, "Beomilgokseo".

November 2005, Korea declared the "Gangneung Dragon Boat Festival" was declared by UNESCO as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of mankind. This news caused a strong reaction in our country at the time, netizens in the major communities have left comments, saying "This is a serious cultural aggression! , "We have forgotten our ancestors!" "'Dragon Boat Festival' has been 'taken away' by South Korea." Indeed, the Dragon Boat Festival is an ancient and important festival in China, originating in China and inherited to this day, forming a series of rich festival culture and valuable intangible cultural heritage, now this festival by the South Koreans, "heritage", emotionally the people of the country is naturally difficult to accept.

But in fact, I studied in South Korea for nearly three years, through personal experience of the Korean "Dragon Boat Festival", found that the two countries Dragon Boat Festival is there are obvious differences. Korea declared the "Gangneung Dragon Boat Festival" has a complete set of folk activities that are both related to and different from the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. The Dragon Boat Festival in China mainly commemorates the great poet Qu Yuan and has a rich variety of contents and forms all over the country, with the phenomenon of co-existence of universality and local specificity; Korea's "Gangneung Dragon Boat Festival" starts from brewing sacred wine, and the main contents include shaman rituals held in Dagwallyeong, worshipping the god of the mountain, and a series of events such as Dagwallyeong Kokushi, Seonghun, and Seonghun, the female Seonghun. The main elements of the festival include shaman rituals in Daegwallyeong, worship of the mountain gods, and a series of rituals for Daegwallyeong's national masters and female gods. Chinese Dragon Boat Festival folk activities include eating zongzi, dragon boat racing, hanging calamus, moxa leaves, fumigation of Cangzhu, Angelica dahurica, drinking xionghuang wine, children wear purse, five poisonous pockets, etc., which is intended to drive away poisonous spirits; South Korea's "Gangneung Duanwu Festival" folk activities include the official Slave masked theater, the Nongle competition, Hesan Odo Dai song, tug-of-war, wrestling, swinging, Chinese poetry composition, competition archery, pot throwing and so on. The festival is a popular recreational activity that includes archery and pot throwing contests.

Experiencing the Korean Dragon Boat Festival, I had a different experience of folk culture from these differences. Although South Korea has already made the Dragon Boat Festival "heritage", I don't think it has any practical significance. "The Dragon Boat Festival, as a folk culture that can be spread and naturally enjoyed throughout East Asia, is not a commercialized registered trademark. And from the perspective of inheritance, I think both Chinese and Koreans, "Dragon Boat Festival" embodied in the different traditional folk culture, in fact, like blood in our lives, it is not subject to the territorial dispute of any impact.