The appeal of traditional Chinese holidays is alleged to lie in
the eating: mooncakes on the Mid-Autumn Festival, sweet dumplings
on Lantern Day, and glutinous rice dumplings for Duanwu, or Dragon
Boat Festival.
But in the run-up to the Dragon Boat Festival, many are
questioning whether modern China is being left starved of the
spirit of the traditional holidays.
The Dragon Boat Festival on Tuesday will see housewives are
wrapping glutinous rice with bamboo or reed leaves, which are,
according to tradition, thrown into rivers to spare from the fish's
mouths the body of a patriotic poet who drowned more than 2,000
years ago.
The poet, Qu Yuan, lived in the state of Chu during the Warring
States period (475 BC to 221 BC). He drowned himself in the Miluo
River in today's Hunan Province in 278 B.C., on fifth day of the
fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, hoping his death could
awaken the king to revitalize the kingdom.
The date has since been remembered as the Dragon Boat Festival,
or Duanwu Festival, on which local fishermen row dragon boats along
the Miluo river to search for Qu Yuan and scatter glutinous rice
dumplings in the water to prevent the fish from eating his
body.
But as the Chinese people's overall living standards improve,
the traditional snack is increasingly available and there's much
less to celebrate on the "glutinous rice dumpling day".
Some hotels and food companies have embellished the snack in
expensive gift packages with the dumplings, salted eggs, wine and
even abalone and shark's fins selling for around 2,000 yuan
each.
"Many Chinese were hurt when the Republic of Korea's application
to list Duanwu as its own cultural heritage was accepted by UNESCO
in 2005," said Chen Jing, a professor of folk culture with the
Nanjing University. "But it's a shame to see that many of us still
take the occasion as one merely for eating snacks or for showing
off wealth."
The whole nation needs to look back to the spirit of its
traditional culture on these centuries-old holidays, experts
say.
"Our forefathers believed that people were most susceptible to
disease in the fifth month of the lunar calendar, also the hottest
time of the year," said Gao Chengyuan, a specialist on folk customs
based in Tianjin. "On Duanwu Festival, people got up early to
collect dew to cleanse their eyes and drink liquor to ward off
snakes and mosquitoes."
Children in particular would wear sachets filled with herbs and
spices and aprons embroidered with the five evils -- scorpion,
toad, spider, snake and centipede -- as mascots to protect them
through the summer, said Gao.
"As a child I used to complain with my mother when she didn't
conjure up a sachet as beautiful as my friends'," said Yang Jun, a
25-year-old store owner in Ningbo, east China's Zhejiang Province.
"When I have a daughter someday, I'll sew her the most beautiful
sachets."
Through certain rituals, people would put the "evil spirits" on
board dragon boats and compete to see whose bad luck was sent
farther away, which was how the occasion got the name of "Dragon
Boat Festival".
Many riverside towns in central and southern China still
organize dragon boat races ahead of the festival, though many admit
the holiday is more associated with eating than the race.
"We need to save from traditional culture from disappearing,"
said Prof. Chen Jing from Nanjing University. "Otherwise we'll lose
even more heritage items."
(Xinhua News Agency June 19, 2007)
