端午为什么要吃粽子？

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Each year, at the start of the lunar calendar, billions of Asians welcome the Lunar New Year by eating lucky foods like dumplings, noodles and pomelos for wealth, longevity and happiness, respectively. As at most other Chinese celebrations, food plays an important role in the celebrations of the Dragon Boat Festival.

Falling on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, the Dragon Boat Festival (known in Chinese as duanwu jie) is usually celebrated at the start of summer. This year's festival will be on June 10, and as in all years since the early fifth and sixth centuries C.E., scores of people of Chinese descent will be heading out to the nearest body of water for dragon boat races, a competitive water sport with decorative boats and paddles. During the festivities, these large, tetrahedral-shaped dumplings can be found freshly steamed or boiled—hanging by a string from ceilings of bakeries, restaurants and even grocers— enticing passers-by to stop and buy a bunch for family and friends.

The origins of the Dragon Boat Festival go back long before the fifth century, to when Qu Yuan (340-278 B.C.E.), generally seen as China’s first known poet, lived and China was made up of independent states all vying for power. A deeply patriotic statesman and chief advisor to the Chu Kingdom, Qu Yuan warned his emperor of a looming military takeover by the imperial Qin dynasty. The emperor’s court saw his warnings as disloyalty, and the emperor sent Qu Yuan to exile. Legend has it that Qu Yuan, disheartened by his government’s lack of trust, took a large stone, tied it to his waist and drowned himself in the Miluo River after the Qin overthrew the Chu capital a few years later.

“The death of Qu Yuan occurred on the fifth day of the fifth month,” says Kam Louie, a Sinologist at the University of Hong Kong and Australia’s University of New South Wales. “People were said to have been so grief- stricken that they decorated their boats with dragon heads and tails and raced around the river to try and find his body while drumming and yelling to make a lot of noise to prevent his body from being eaten by fish and other sea creatures.”