Customs of the Dragon Boat Festival include: picking dragon boats, hanging mugwort and calamus, eating zong at Dragon Boat Festival, washing herbal water, and tying five-colored silk threads. The origin of ancient traditional festivals and ancient primitive beliefs, sacrificial culture and the sky, calendar and other human and natural cultural content. The two most important activities of the Dragon Boat Festival, eating zongzi and racing, are both related to dragons.
1, steak dragon boat
Steak dragon boat is an important activity of the Dragon Boat Festival, is an ancient dragon totem ritual festival, is a custom. According to the Hemudu site, the first phase of the excavation report, as early as 7000 years ago, the ancient ancestors have been routed into a wooden boat with a single wood, and add a wooden paddle rowing. The dragon boat was initially a canoe with a dragon carved on a single wooden boat, which later developed into a dragon boat made of wooden planks.
The steak dragon boat has a long history and is a multi-person collective paddling competition. The dragon boat race is divided into several sections such as inviting the dragon, sacrificing to the dragon god, swimming the dragon and collecting the dragon. Before the dragon boat racing generally have to hold a grand sacrificial ceremony, first to invite the dragon, sacrifice to the god. Before the Dragon Boat Festival, we have to choose an auspicious day to get up from underwater, and after sacrificing to the gods, we will put on the dragon head and dragon tail, and then prepare for the race.
2, hanging mugwort and calamus
In the Dragon Boat Festival arrangement of all kinds of flowers and plants that can drive away evil spirits and diseases, the source is also long. People to insert the mugwort and calamus as one of the important contents of the Dragon Boat Festival. Such as hanging moxa in the door, "Jing Chu chronicle": "picking moxa as a person, hanging on the portal, in order to avoid poisonous gas." This is due to the important medicinal plants, and can make moxa velvet treatment, moxibustion points, and can drive away insects.
May Ai contains the most moxa oil, (at this time is the peak growth period) so the effect is the best, people also scramble to pick Ai. Often hang a few plants of mugwort in front of the house, because of the special flavor of mugwort, people use it to drive away diseases, mosquitoes, evil spirits.
3, Dragon Boat Festival food dumplings
Duanwu food dumplings, is a traditional Chinese custom since ancient times. Zong, that is, "zong zong", commonly known as "zongzi", is "zong" one of the kind of. "Dumplings" are used to worship the gods and ancestors during festivals, there are many varieties of dumplings, different festivals will do different dumplings, do dumplings to worship the gods and ancestors is an ancient custom.
The main materials of zongzi are rice, stuffing and Ruo leaves (or Shuusei leaves), etc., and there are many different kinds of zongzi. Due to the different dietary habits of different parts of the world, zongzi formed the north and south flavor; from the taste points, zongzi have salty zongzi and sweet zongzi two categories. Duanwu food dumplings custom, for thousands of years in China, has become the Chinese nation's most influential, the widest coverage of one of the folk dietary practices, and spread to North Korea, Japan and Southeast Asian countries.
4, wash herbal water
Herbal water, that is, the ancient records of the Mu Lan Tang, Dragon Boat Festival wash herbal water can cure skin diseases, to the evil. The Dragon Boat Festival is the most medicinal day of the year for grasses and trees, and there are medicines everywhere on the Dragon Boat Festival. During the Dragon Boat Festival, many places in China have the custom of picking herbs and cooking herbal water for bathing, in which the medicinal properties of Dragon Boat Festival herbs play a vital role.
5, tethered five-color thread
Traditional Chinese culture, a symbol of the five sides of the five elements of the five colors, "green, red, white, black, yellow" is regarded as an auspicious color. It was once a popular custom to tie the arms of the Dragon Boat Festival with five-color silk threads. Passed on to later generations, that is, developed into such as long-life wisps, long-life locks, incense packets and many other kinds of beautiful ornaments, the production is also becoming more and more sophisticated, become the Dragon Boat Festival unique folk art.
On the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, children should be tied on the wrists and ankles with five-color silk thread to drive away evil spirits. The traditional custom, with red, green, yellow, white and black thick silk thread rolled into a colorful rope, tied to the arm or neck of a small child, since the fifth of May tied up, until the eve of the "seven mother mother" birthday, only to be dismantled together with the gold kozo burned. There is also a saying that in the first rainy day after the Dragon Boat Festival, the colorful thread cut down and thrown in the rain, meaning that the river will be plague, disease, said to be able to go to the evil spirits, disasters, will bring a year of good luck.
Baidu Encyclopedia - Dragon Boat Festival