The unique Mid-Autumn Festival Fire Dragon Dance

Fire Dragon Dance is a unique folk activity in Junhe Street, which has been registered and established by the general survey of intangible cultural heritage in our district. Every Mid-Autumn Festival, villagers in Shima, Pingsha, clear lake, Luogang and other natural villages in Junhe Street weave grass dragons with banyan branches or straw. The dancers are all young men in the village, and they start to dance dragons on Mid-Autumn Night, starting from the small ancestral hall in the village to the big ancestral hall. The villagers rushed to set off with fire dragons, and it was very lively.

according to the new town annals, in the autumn of the 1th year of Xianfeng in Qing dynasty (185), a large number of locusts suddenly flew in from the north, endangering the seedlings. At that time, the area around Junhe was agriculture-oriented, and people were very worried to see that a year's hard work would ruin the insect population. It's Mid-Autumn Festival, and while the stars are shining, the villagers in Shima, Pingsha, clear lake and Luogang, four villages near Junhe Street, all want to dance fire dragons in the fields at night to drive away pests. The four villages joined together and danced until the early morning of the next day before returning from the fields. Strange to say, since dancing the dragon, the pests have flown away and the harvest has been saved. Since then, the dragon dance has been passed down from generation to generation, until today.

In the old days, it was said that a dancer who mastered the fire faucet could give birth to a male. Every time he danced the fire dragon, the masses took an active part. Now the Mid-Autumn Festival Dragon Dance has become a festival cultural element in our region, which is used to express simple folk customs. It is understood that the members of Junhe Street Dance Fire Dragon can only be teenagers, and now adults and even the elderly can participate.