Dragon Boat in China
2 min readThe Origin of Dragon Boat
The dragon boat race is mainly popular in the south of China，where water in rivers and lakes is plentiful.The custom has a legend behind.The wide-spread legend says that when Qu Yuan，a great patriotic poet of the States of Chu（present Hubei Province）in the period of the Warring States（475-221B.C.），drowned himself in the Miluo River of present Hubei for his motherland on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month in 278 B.C.，the local people boated down the river retrieving his corpse.They were joined by fishermen who were fishing in boats on Dongting Lake in present Hubei when they came to the lake.Since then the dragon boat race has been held to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival.
Styles of Traditional Dragon Boats
Traditional dragon-boats can also be categorized into two types in terms of their roles:the show boat and the race boat.The former is an attractively adorned big boat for demonstration and performances with musical instruments like drums and gongs，and various feat shows to activate the atmosphere in the course of the race.
The latter，on the other hand，is a narrow and long canoe decorated only on the bowand stern like the head and tail of a dragon.The race boat can be small，medium or big in size according to the number of paddlers it carries inside.Usually the small race boat is about 4 to 6 meters in length with the capacity of carrying 10 paddlers，the middle one 17 to 23 meters with 20 to 50 paddlers，while the large one can be as long as 30 to 33 meters and carry within it 60 to 100 paddlers.
Occasionally there are exceptionally huge race boats with a capacity of 200 paddlers.
