Dragon Boat Festival
Chinese festival
The Dragon Boat Festival (traditional Chinese: 端午節; simplified Chinese: 端午节; pinyin: Duānwǔ jié; Cantonese Yale: Dyūnńgh jit), also known as the Duanwu Festival or Tuen Ng Festival, is a traditional Chinese holiday that occurs on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese calendar, which corresponds to late May or early June in the Gregorian calendar. The holiday commemorates Qu Yuan who was the beloved prime minister of the southern Chinese state of Chu during the Warring States period, about 600 B.C. to 200 B.C., and is celebrated by holding dragon boat races and eating sticky rice dumplings called zongzi, which were southern Chinese traditions. The Dragon Boat Festival integrates praying for good luck and taking respite from the summer heat.
In September 2009, UNESCO officially approved the holiday's inclusion in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, becoming the first Chinese holiday to be selected.
Names
Other than "Dragon Boat Festival", used as the official English translation of the holiday by the People's Republic of China, and "Tuen Ng Festival", as used by Hong Kong as the official English name, it is also referred to in some English sources as Double Fifth Festival which alludes to the day of the festival according to the Chinese calendar.
The Chinese name of the festival is pronounced differently in different Chinese languages. Duanwu (端午) literally means 'starting five'—i.e., the first "fifth day" of the month according to the Chinese zodiac. However, despite the literal meaning referring to the Earthly Branches, this character has also become associated with wǔ (五; wu3; 'five'), due to the characters often having the same pronunciation. Hence Duanwu, the festival on "the fifth day of the fifth month".
History
Origin
The fifth lunisolar month is considered an unlucky and poisonous month, and the fifth day of the fifth month especially so.
“Dragon Boat Festival” enters the record as chinese festival. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dragon, Boat and Festival can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1254268. The Library of Congress control number is sh85039279. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dragon Boat Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.