Something like a dragon boat festival is ideal for my goals with our World Culture Tour. It brings out many different elements of a culture and puts it visually all into one place. A festival like this can be a lot of fun. Charlotte's Dragon Boat Festival was no exception on the fun. It also proved very educational.
Of course there were dragon boats, but more on that later.
There was food galore. There were Chinese toys and decorations. There were plenty of people in costume.
The festival had traditional and modern Chinese music as well as dancers, who were also in beautiful Chinese outfits.
Also, as an ideal element to a homebound world culture tour, it's great to get out into an event filled with people from all over the world but specifically from the region your studying.
Back to those dragon boats.
From Wikipedia -
Similar to the use of outrigger canoes or Polynesian va'a, dragon boat racing has a rich fabric of ancient ceremonial, ritualistic and religious traditions, and thus, the modern competitive aspect is but one small part of this complex dragon boat culture. The use of dragon boats for racing and dragons are believed by scholars, sinologists, and anthropologists to have originated in southern central China more than 2500 years ago, in Dongting Lake and along the banks of the Chang Jiang (now called the Yangtze) during the same era when the games of ancient Greece were being established at Olympia.[1] Dragon boat racing has been practiced continuously since this period as the basis for annual water rituals and festival celebrations, and for the traditional veneration of the Chinese dragon water deity. The celebration was an important part of the ancient Chinese agricultural society, celebrating the summer rice planting. Dragon boat racing was historically situated in the Chinese subcontinent's southern-central "rice bowl"; where there were rice paddies, so there were dragon boats, too.
In today's world, rowing teams get together in a decorated dragon boat (not all are decorated as dragons or even with a Chinese theme) and race to see who's fastest. Instead of the typical method where the team captain shouts to the rowing team, they keep pace by banging on a drum!
It's very competitive and can be a lot of fun to participate in or simply to watch.
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