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Language Matters | The myth behind the Dragon Boat Festival began with a poet’s death. His work lives on
- In exile, poet and statesman Qu Yuan wrote an influential Chinese poem. His death in 278BC sparked the myth behind the Dragon Boat Festival
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For East and Southeast Asia, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month is Tuen Ng Jit (Cantonese) or Duānwǔjié (Mandarin).
Ng/wu refers to the sun’s position at its highest point, and tuen/duan means “extreme, upright”, referring to the summer solstice.
Celebrations include eating sticky rice dumplings (zongzi) and racing dragon boats – prompting the English nickname Dragon Boat Festival.
Its origins in Chinese mythology are darker: it commemorates the suicide in 278BC of Qu Yuan (屈原), a well-loved poet and statesman of the Chu kingdom, during the Zhou dynasty’s Warring States period.
A champion of political loyalty and truth, Qu Yuan advocated resistance to the hegemonic Qin state – which led to jealous, corrupt rivals’ accusations of treason, and his subsequent banishment.
Lisa Lim is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University in Perth, having previously held professoriate positions at universities in Singapore, Amsterdam, Sydney and Hong Kong, where she was Head of the University of Hong Kong's School of English. Her interests encompass multilingualism, World Englishes, minority and endangered languages, and the sociolinguistics of globalisation. Books written by Lim include Languages in Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Multilingual Citizen (Multilingual Matters, 2018).
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