The Dragon Boat Festival: a poison day with a poet added

Always the fifth of the fifth on the Chinese calendar, almost never the same western date twice. The lunar month runs new moon to new moon, so twelve of them fall short of the solar year and a whole extra month is added every two or three years to catch up; the festival keeps its lunar address and the Gregorian date swings by nearly a month around it. These dates are computed from the same engine that runs our calendar converter, and they run backward too, because a race date gets looked up for old photographs as often as for next summer's plans.

Qu Yuan is real. He was a minister of the southern kingdom of Chu in the late fourth and early third centuries BC, slandered at court, banished, the author of the Li Sao, the longest and strangest poem of early China, and Sima Qian gave him a biography in the Records of the Grand Historian around 100 BC. It ends with the fall of Chu's capital to Qin and a single clause: "he clasped a stone and sank himself in the Miluo and died." That is all. No month, no day. No fishermen rowing out to save him, no rice thrown in the river to keep the fish off his body, no drum. Sima Qian, writing less than two centuries after the event and with a poet's own sympathy for a man destroyed by a court, does not know of a festival, because there was not one attached to him yet.

The join is visible four hundred years later, and it is visible because the man who wrote it down told you it was a story. The Xu Qixie Ji, a sixth-century collection of marvels, says that after Qu Yuan drowned on the fifth of the fifth, the people of Chu mourned him each year by throwing rice in bamboo tubes into the water; then, in the reign of the Han emperor Guangwu, around AD 40, a man of Changsha met a scholar who introduced himself as the Grand Master of the Three Wards, Qu Yuan's old title. "I hear you mean to make me an offering; very good," says the ghost. "But every year the dragons steal it. If you would be kind, stop the tube with chinaberry leaves and tie it with colored silk; those two things the dragons fear." The man does, and, the book concludes, "today's custom of making zongzi with chinaberry leaves and five-colored thread is what remains of it." That paragraph is the source of the version you have heard. It is an etiology, a just-so story explaining a food that already existed, and it dates itself.

The same century produced the first calendar of Chinese customs, the Jingchu Suishiji, and its commentator, a Sui official named Du Gongzhan, already had doubts. The main text says only that on this day "there are boat races." Du's note says that "by custom" this is the day Qu Yuan went into the Miluo, and people "grieve at the place he died and so send out boats to save him." Then he keeps going. A stele inscription from the second century, he says, records that on the fifth of the fifth the people of Wu "went out to welcome Lord Wu," meaning the general Wu Zixu, whose body the king of Wu had thrown into the river, "so the eastern Wu custom concerns Zixu and has nothing to do with Qu Ping." And the Records of the Yue Lands says the races "began with King Goujian of Yue." His verdict: "it cannot be settled." Fourteen centuries later, when UNESCO inscribed the festival in 2009, its citation named three heroes for three regions: Qu Yuan in Hubei and Hunan, Wu Zixu in the south, and a Dai hero in Yunnan. The day came first, and each river put its own dead man in it.

What the day was before the poet is written down in the same sources, and in one that is older than all of them. Sima Qian's biography of Lord Mengchang, the great aristocratic patron of the third century BC, begins with his birth. His father had forty sons, and this one was born to a concubine on the fifth day of the fifth month, and the father told the mother not to raise him. She hid him and raised him anyway, and when the boy was grown and finally presented, the father was furious. The son asked him why a fifth-month child should not be raised. "A child of the fifth month," the father said, "will grow as tall as the door and harm his parents." The boy's reply, that a man receives his fate from heaven and not from a door, is the reason the story is told; but the belief it records, that the fifth of the fifth is a bad day to be born, is two hundred years older than the poet's death and has nothing to do with him.

By the sixth century the reasoning was explicit. "The fifth month is commonly called the evil month," says the Jingchu Suishiji, "and has many prohibitions": do not air the bedding, do not roof the house. Its commentary quotes a Han book with the rule that climbing onto a roof in the fifth month makes your hair fall out, and a scholar who traced the whole set of taboos to a ban of the First Emperor's. Underneath the superstition is a climate. The fifth lunar month is early summer in the Yangzi valley, when the heat and the rains arrive together and with them the snakes, scorpions, centipedes, toads and lizards the tradition calls the five poisons, and the fevers. The fifth day, in a system that counted by the yang number, was the day the danger peaked. So you defended the house.

The defenses are the festival. The Jingchu Suishiji calls the day "the Orchid-Bath festival," after a line in the Songs of Chu about bathing in orchid water, and lists what people did: they held a contest of gathering herbs; they "picked mugwort and made it into a figure of a man and hung it above the door, to ward off poisonous qi"; they put calamus, shaved or chopped, into their wine; they gathered medicinal plants of every kind. And they tied five-colored silk thread around the arm, "called bibing, 'wards off weapons', so that a person does not fall to plague." Each of those is on a Chinese door or wrist today. The mugwort figure was still being nailed to every door of Kaifeng in the 1140s, according to Meng Yuanlao, who lists the festival's market goods: mugwort flowers, painted fans, sweets, rice dumplings, five-colored water balls, calamus, and "on the day, every household lays them out at the front door." The realgar wine of later custom, arsenic in rice wine dabbed on children's foreheads, is the same idea with a stronger poison.

The races are the oldest thing on the water, and the dragon is the water. Du Gongzhan's note is the earliest description of the sport, and it reads like a report from a riverbank. The boats are chosen for lightness and speed and are called "flying ducks"; one crew calls its boat the water-cart and another the water-horse; the governor and the townspeople all come down to the river to watch. His explanation of why it is this region's sport is the good one: "the people of Yue use boats as carts and oars as horses." The far south was a country of rivers before it was a country of roads, and a boat race on the day the summer floods began was what a horse race was elsewhere, with the additional purpose of dealing with what lived in the river.

That is where the dragon comes in. In Chinese cosmology the dragon is not a monster but the master of water, the bringer of rain, the thing coiled in the deep pool at the bend of the river; the site's page on the dragon has the creature in full. To carve its head on the prow of your boat and race it on the fifth of the fifth was to borrow its shape on the day the rains were about to decide the year. The modern sport keeps the head and the drum and has standardized the rest: twenty paddlers, a drummer in the bow, a steersman at the stern, distances of two hundred to two thousand meters, and a world federation with championships, all of which grew out of the races Hong Kong began opening to foreign crews in the 1970s. Somewhere in the middle of every one of those races, a crew from Chu is still trying to reach a poet in time.

Zongzi is glutinous rice packed into a leaf, tied with string, and boiled or steamed for hours until the leaf has flavored it: bamboo leaf in most places, reed leaf in the north, lotus in the south. Northern ones are sweet, with dates or bean paste; southern ones are savory, with pork belly, salted egg yolk and chestnuts; the plain ones are eaten dipped in sugar. The earliest form was rice sealed in a tube of bamboo, which is what the ghost in the Xu Qixie Ji was complaining about.

Here is the detail the guidebooks leave out. In the Jingchu Suishiji, the dumplings are not under the fifth of the fifth at all. They appear a few lines later, under the summer solstice: "on the solstice, eat zong," with a note that the Fengtu Ji of the third century calls them "horned millet" and describes them packed in fresh bamboo tubes, with chinaberry leaves and five-colored thread tied on the arm. The solstice and the fifth of the fifth fall within a few weeks of each other, both marked the turn of the year's yang, and the food drifted from one to the other as the poet's story gave the fifth a reason to need it. By the Song it was firmly on the fifth, and by now it is the festival's name in half the world: the Dragon Boat Festival is, in Cantonese kitchens, simply the day you make zung.

A day off. The Tang administrative code of 738 already gave every official one day's leave for the fifth of the fifth, in the same list as the fifteenth of the first month and the ninth of the ninth; the People's Republic restored it as a statutory holiday in 2008, and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan keep it too. Families make or buy zongzi in the days before, hang mugwort and calamus on the door on the morning, tie five-colored thread on the children and pin small embroidered sachets of herbs to their clothes, and go to the river. In Hunan the races are still, formally, for Qu Yuan, and rice is still thrown in the water at Miluo. In Suzhou they are for Wu Zixu. Everywhere the drum is the same.

Two small modern arguments attach to the day. One is about the greeting: for a decade a wish of "peace and health," duānwǔ ānkāng, has been offered online as the correct alternative to "happy Duanwu," on the theory that a day of plague-warding and a drowned poet is not a day for happiness. It is a recent fashion, and most people say happy. The other is the Legend of the White Snake, the opera in which a snake-spirit who has married a mortal is tricked into drinking realgar wine on this day and shows her true form in the bedroom; the story is Ming, the realgar is why it is set on Duanwu, and it is the reason a great many Chinese children first heard of the festival as the day you find out what your wife really is.