Dragon Boat Festival is the fifth day of the fifth lunar month every year. It is one of the ancient traditional festivals of the Chinese nation. Dragon Boat Festival is also called Duanwu and Duanyang. In addition, there are many nicknames for the Dragon Boat Festival, such as: Noon Festival, Chongwu Festival, May Festival, Yulan Festival, Daughter's Day, Tianzhong Festival, Dila Festival, Poet's Day, Dragon Day and so on. Although the names are different, on the whole, the customs of people around the country are more similar than different.
Dragon Boat Festival custom:
Collecting herbs is one of the oldest customs of Dragon Boat Festival. Folklore believes that the Dragon Boat Festival is full of yang, which is the day when vegetation has the strongest traditional Chinese medicine in a year, and the Dragon Boat Festival is full of medicines. Herb picking is because the stems and leaves of herbs are mature and have good medicinal properties before and after the Dragon Boat Festival, and this custom was formed on this day. Collecting herbs and setting up all kinds of flowers and plants to exorcise evil spirits in the Dragon Boat Festival have a long history. This custom had a wide influence in the Han Dynasty, and later it gradually affected East Asian countries. At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, "Da Dai Li Ji"? Xia Xiaozheng wrote: "Store medicine this day to remove poisonous gas." Volume 22 of "Collection of Miscellaneous Drugs" quoted the lost article of "Collection of Miscellaneous Drugs at the Age of Jingchu": "On May 5, competing for miscellaneous drugs can cure all diseases."
Dragon boat race is the main custom of Dragon Boat Festival. Dragon boat race has a long history, which is a traditional folk water sports and entertainment project in China. It is mostly held on festive festivals and is a multi-person collective rowing competition. The word "dragon boat" was first found in the pre-Qin ancient book "Biography of Mu Tianzi", Volume 5: "Tianzi rides a bird boat and the dragon boat floats in the marsh"; In "Nine Songs Xiang Jun", "Driving a flying dragon to the north today, driving my way to the Dongting", "The stone wrasse is shallow and the flying dragon is graceful". Scholars believe that the "flying dragon" recorded in the article is the dragon boat. These dragon boats usually sink at the bottom of rivers and lakes, and some of them are placed on wooden frames on land and protected by scaffolding. Every year around the first day of May, the dragon boat is launched or floated from the bottom of the water, and sailors begin to train until the fifth day of May to participate in the competition.
Eating zongzi on Dragon Boat Festival is a traditional folk custom in China. Zongzi, also known as "Jiaoshu", "Zongban" and "Tongzong", has a long history and various patterns. "wormwood leaves are fragrant and fragrant; Peach branches are inserted in the gate, and when you go out, you can see the wheat is yellow; "It's sunny here, sunny there, and sunny everywhere." This is a popular ballad describing the Dragon Boat Festival in the old days. Generally speaking, people around the world have the same custom of celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival, and eating zongzi on the Dragon Boat Festival has been the same throughout China. Ancient rice dumplings appeared as early as the Spring and Autumn Period, and were originally used to worship ancestors and gods. In the Jin Dynasty, it became the food for the Dragon Boat Festival celebration.
As the folk saying goes, "Willows are inserted in Qingming Festival, and wormwood is inserted in Dragon Boat Festival". On the Dragon Boat Festival, people regard inserting wormwood and calamus as one of the important contents, and every family sweeps the courtyard, inserting calamus and moxa sticks in the eyebrows and hanging them in the hall. Acorus calamus is a perennial aquatic herb, and its long and narrow leaves also contain volatile aromatic oil, which is a drug for dredging orifices, strengthening bones and resolving stagnation, killing insects and sterilizing. Acorus calamus leaves are sword-shaped, which can ward off evil spirits when inserted at the door, so alchemists call it "water sword", and later customs extend it to "Pujian", which can cut thousands of evil spirits. Wormwood represents a hundred blessings, and it is a kind of herb that can cure diseases. Inserting it at the door can make you healthy.
Bathing orchids at noon is an ancient custom recorded in Da Dai Li, but the orchids in this article are not orchids, but Eupatorium odoratum or herbs of Compositae, which have a fragrance and can be boiled and bathed. "Nine Songs in the Cloud" also has the sentence "Bathing orchid soup will make you fragrant". "A Record of Jingchu's Age": "May 5th is called the Orchid Bathing Festival." "Five Miscellanies" records that people in the Ming Dynasty took a bath with five-colored grass at noon because "orchid soup is not available". Later, it was usually fried cattails, wormwood and other herbs to take a bath. In Guangdong, children are boiled and washed with wormwood and wheat medicine, or with flowers and plants such as wormwood, cattail and magnolia. Teenagers and adult men go to rivers and beaches to take a shower, which is called washing dragon boat water to wash away bad luck.