From Website : www.culture.tw (more stories on the website) Dragon Boat Festival is one of the three major Chinese traditional holidays, falling on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar each year. The festival marks the start of the fifth month, a transitional phase between spring and summer when various diseases tend to spread. The ancients believed that ghosts and spirits were responsible for the illnesses, and they would carry small fragrant sachets with them, or hang sprigs of mugwort and calamus on their doors to ward off evil spirits and make it safely through the season in peace. An alternate version of the origin of the festival is that it commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, who lived over 2 thousand years ago as a ranking official in the state of Chu, during the Warring State period of the Zhou Dynasty. He was disheartened to see his country in grave danger, but powerless to do much because he was framed by his enemies. Heartbroken and desperate, he committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. To find his body, villagers boarded boats and threw rice and food into the river to prevent fish from eating his corpse. This practice eventually evolved into the festival traditions of holding dragon boat races and eating zongzi, an angular rice ravioli which is wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed. From an ethnological perspective the boat races can be seen as a form of cultural tradition, but they …

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