Festivals · Fifth day of the fifth lunar month — usually June.
Commemorates Qu Yuan, a poet and minister who drowned himself in the Miluo River in 278 BC after his state was overrun; villagers raced boats out to recover his body and threw rice into the water so the fish would leave him alone. Two thousand three hundred years later the boats still race and people still eat the rice. The racing is genuine sport — long narrow hulls, a drummer setting the stroke, crews from villages and companies that train for months. Southern China takes it far more seriously than the north; the Pearl River Delta and Hunan are the heartlands.
Eat — Zongzi (粽子) — glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaf and steamed. Sweet with red bean in the north, savoury with pork belly and salted egg yolk in the south. The argument about which is correct is entirely serious.
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