History and Culture

The Dragon Boat. The history and culture of Dragon Boat Racing goes back over 2200 years and has its roots in the legend of Qu Yuan and the sacrifice he made for his country in the third century B.C, when he drowned himself in the Milo River, in Southern China, in protest against the corrupt regimes of that bellicose period, known as Zhan Guo or Warring States.

This region of China was then known as the State of Chu, the last State to be unified under the 1st Emperor. Today Chu is called the Hunan Province.

Qu Yuan, who was an actual historical person, was born in Zigui County of Hubei Province, which is situated at the southern extremity of the Yangtse River, where dragon boat races are held to this day, including the 76 kilometre long 3 Gorges dragon boat rally.

In fact, Dragon Boating as a Chinese traditional activity, is much older than the annual mass participation races that began as a tribute to the patriotic Qu Yuan. Its full history is well documented in many and various authoritative books, which indicate that Dragon Boating must be the world’s oldest organised continuous competitive activity, pre-dating the Olympic Games of ancient Greece by at least a thousand years.

Proof of this claim can be found at the Qu Jialing cultural ruins in Hubei Province, where a drawing of a dragon boat race on a spinning wheel was unearthed, that was between 4000 and 5000 years old. The boat pictured had the head of a dragon, contained a drum and was flying banners.

In the background scene of the drawing was a river bank with railings decorated with flags. Other artefacts, such as the steering oars used in dragon boating, along with patterns of a dragon and a phoenix, dated at over 7000 years old, have also been excavated in other parts of China.

As far as we know, Dragon Boats served no dedicated utilitarian or military purpose but ritualistic contests known as Long Zhou Jing Du ("to contend and cross the waters") have also been recorded from the Zhou Dynasty onwards, which predates the Christian era.

Accurate renditions of boat races in the Song Dynasty China and in the later Yuan Dynasty period depict dragon boats, dragon boat barges, tiger boats and pheonix boats arrayed in lanes for competition on a marked regatta course in the ancient Chinese capital city known as Kaifeng.

From the 18th Century onwards, Europeans have erroneously referred to the Chinese 5th Day of the 5th Lunar Month festival during which dragon boats were seen being raced as "Dragon Boat Festival", when in fact the actual summer solstice observance is called Tuen Ng or Duan Wu / Duan Yang.

In the late 1800s the British military commander, General Gordon, made note of an attack by "centipede" boats (dragon boats) manned by Chinese rebels of the Taiping Rebellion attempting to breach a colonial naval blockade of the Yangtse River near present day Wuhan.