DRAGON BOAT FESTIVAL FUN 端午节 duānwǔ jié The Dragon Boat Festival is a traditional Chinese holiday that takes place on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month. In 2022, the festival will be celebrated on June 3! The festival is traditionally celebrated by holding dragon boat races and eating zongzi, a type of sticky rice dumpling wrapped in a bamboo leaf. At Asia Society Texas’s AsiaFest celebration, on Saturday, June 11, you will be able to see a real dragon boat on our front lawn, and learn how they are rowed to the rhythm of a large drum. There is a special story behind the Dragon Boat Festival. A long time ago in China there lived a poet named Qu Yuan. He found out that a neighboring state was going to attack the state that he lived in. But when he told his king about the attack, the king kicked him out of the state. Several years later, Qu Yuan found out that his state had been conquered. He was so sad, that he threw himself in a river. The neighboring people were so upset that they went out in their boats and threw packets of rice into the river so that fish would eat the rice instead of Qu Yuan’s body. This is why people make the zongzi dumplings and race boats for the Dragon Boat Festival. In this activity packet you can make a dragon boat puppet, make a zongzi dumpling out of paper, and learn how to write “dragon” and “dragon boat festival” in Chinese!
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