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 Dragon Boat History

Similar to outrigger canoe (va’a) racing but unlike competitive rowing and canoe racing, dragon boating has a rich fabric of ancient ceremonial, ritualistic and religious traditions. In other words, the modern competitive aspect is but one small part of this complex of watercraftsmanship.

The use of dragon boats for racing and dragons are believed by modern scholars, sinologists and anthropologists – for example Joseph Needham and George Worcester, author of Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze River — to have originated in southern central China more than 2,500 years ago, along the banks of such iconic rivers as the Chang Jiang, also known as Yangtze (that is, during the same era when the games of ancient Greece were being established at Olympia). Dragon boat racing as the basis for annual water rituals and festival celebrations, and for the traditional veneration of the Asian dragon water deity, has been practiced continuously since this period. The celebration is an important part of ancient agricultural Chinese society, celebrating the summer rice harvest. Dragonboat racing activity historically was situated in the Chinese sub-continent’s southern-central “rice bowl”: where there were rice paddies, so were there dragonboats.

There are long paddled boats depicted on ancient Dong Son drums from the southern China (Yunnan Province) and Anam / Viet Nam region. Comparable watercraft are shown in bas relief carvings at the Angkor Wat a world heritage site in Cambodia.

Contemporary folk tradition commonly attributes dragon boating’s origins to the saving of a drowning folk hero, Qu Yuan. But dragon boats are raced in some parts of China where this legendary figure is not venerated and revered, and the competitions predate the Qu Yuan legend itself, a tale which emerged only in the Han Dynasty, as listed in Sima Qian’s work, Record of the Grand Historian. Qu Yuan and his resurrection following his suicidal drowning in the Miluo River to protest political corruption can also be regarded on a sociological level as a kind of fertility god for ensuring good rice crop harvests, giving rise to annual re-enactments by the agrarian societies living in the rice-reaping regions of ancient China. Rice seedlings are annually ‘drowned’ underwater in the rice paddies, and this is annually symbolized by Qu Yuan’s watery demise during the Duan Wu Jie.
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