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Races and poems for Dragon Boat Festival
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RESIDENTS in Baoshan District today took part in a dragon-boat race and wrote poems together in traditional local ways to celebrate the coming Dragon-boat Festival which falls on Tuesday.
Over 1,000 residents in Gucun Town gathered in a plaza to recite poems about the festival. They either recited classical Chinese poems or made their own works and shared with each other.
Residents in the town has a long history of creating or reciting poems to commemorate the ancient Chinese poet and politician Qu Yuan (340-278 BC), who threw himself into the Miluo River in protest to court corruption.
The town was listed as a Chinese Folk Culture and Art Village by the Ministry of Culture in 2008. The Gucun poetry making has also been named as a district-level intangible cultural heritage, according to the township government.
In the neighboring Luodian Town, three colorful dragon boats, a national-level intangible cultural heritage that appeared as early as the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), raced with each other in an artificial lake in the Oriental Holiday Garden in the morning.
A traditional ceremony was held before the racing to wish a good luck and ward off the "evil" for the township residents. The boat was decorated with colorful flags in three layers on both sides and five or six musicians sat in the middle of the boat under the flags, playing instruments while eight scullers propelled the craft.
Luodian dragon boats are unique in appearance comparing with those in Jiangsu, Zhejiang or Guangdong provinces, small with flat bottoms to handle the narrow, shallow local river. The boats in blue, yellow and red are about 12 meters long, wide in the middle yet very narrow fore and aft.
"The dragon boats have been a part of life in Luodian for centuries, firstly as an essential transport in the water town and later became a tradition culture," said Zhang Fucheng, 84, the inheritor of the skills. Zhang has made eight dragon boats with his family since 1995. Three of his masterpieces were displayed in the racing today.
The district government also launched a study and research center for the intangible cultural heritages of Baoshan in Luodian Town. Traditional paintings, dragon boat models and historic photos about the traditional skills are being exhibited in the new center in the holiday garden.
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