Dragon Boats

Today we had a meeting with a customer in Songjiang, an aria on the west side of Shanghai closer to some lakes.

On Monday we have Duanwu Festival or better known as Dragon Boat festival (the 5th day of the 5th lunar month). The festival is to commemorates the death of a poet Qu Yuan who committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

The story said that local people, who admired him, threw lumps of rice into the river to feed the fish so that they would not eat his body. The local people were also said to have paddled out on boats, either to scare the fish away or to retrieve his body.

This is also the origin of dragon boat racing and on Monday these boats will race each other.