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Lisa Lim

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.
When Chu’s capital was eventually taken by Qin, Qu Yuan drowned himself in the Miluo River – on the fifth day of the fifth month. Locals rowed out to try to save him, and threw rice into the river to prevent fish from consuming the corpse – suggested as precursors to dragon boat racing and zongzi.
During Qu Yuan’s exile, he penned what is regarded as the most innovative and influential work in the history of Chinese poetry, Li Sao (離騷).

An extended political allegory, it is hailed for being the first in several aspects, including extensive dialogue with multiple characters as a poetic device, and complex imagery involving landscape and flora:
“The three kings of old were most pure and perfect:
Then indeed fragrant flowers had their proper place.
They brought together pepper and cinnamon;
All the most prized blossoms were woven in their garlands.”
It also exploits puns and double meanings, including with its title.

Traditionally rendered as “Encountering Sorrow”, Li Sao is suggested to have four readings: leaving or encountering trouble, or, with the character sao interchangeable with a homophonous character meaning “stench”, also encountering or leaving the stench.
Great poetry persists when sentiments have relevance across time and space. The despair conveyed through the first-person persona in the four-line conclusion surely resonates worldwide today:
“Enough! There are no true men in the state: no one understands me
Why should I cleave to the city of my birth?
Since none is worthy to work with me in making good government,
I shall go and join Peng Xian in the place where he abides.”


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Chinese culture

The myth behind the Dragon Boat Festival began with a poet’s death. His work lives on

Qu Yuan was a Chinese poet who advocated resistance to the hegemonic Qin state during the Warring States Period (475BC–221BC). Photo: Getty Images

A dragon boat race in Sai Kung in Hong Kong during the Dragon Boat Festival. A poet’s death in 278BC forms the basis of the festival’s origin myth. Photo: Dickson Lee

Participants take part in a dragon boat race in Aberdeen, Hong Kong, in 2023. Photo: Sam Tsang

Qu Yuan was a Chinese poet who advocated resistance to the hegemonic Qin state during the Warring States Period (475BC-221BC). Photo: Getty Images

Dragon Boat Regatta on Jinming Lake, a painting by Wang Zhenpeng in the 14th century. Photo: Getty Images

Zongzi in all their glory: Dragon Boat Festival sticky rice dumpling types around Asia

Malaysian bak chang sticky rice dumplings. Photo: Getty Images

Tuen Ng sticky rice dumplings at Hong Kong Cantonese restaurant Ming Court. Across Asia, zongzi are eaten to celebrate Dragon Boat Festival, but how they’re made and what they contain differs. Photo: Ming Court

A Cantonese rice dumpling, or zongzi. Photo: Dashijie

Theresa Yiu, the founder of Hong Kong gourmet food brand Dashijie Photo: Dashijie

A red bean sticky rice dumpling at Hong Kong restaurant Jiangsu Club. Photo: Jiangsu Club

A Shanghainese sticky rice dumpling. Photo: Dashije

Bak chang sticky rice dumplings are commonly eaten in Malaysia. Photo: Getty Images

Ka cang sweet sticky rice dumplings are a popular snack in Thailand. Photo: Getty Images

In Vietnam, banh chung sticky rice dumplings are eaten to celebrate Dragon Boat Festival and Tet. Photo: Getty Images

Dragon Boat Festival 2024: 10 Hong Kong restaurants’ creative sticky rice dumplings

The Fullerton Ocean Park Hotel presents a special rice-dumpling-inspired bag with every purchase of rice dumplings. Photo: Fullerton Ocean Park

Ming Pavilion’s sticky rice dumpling with abalone, conpoy and organic pork belly. Hong Kong restaurants have come up with a variety of creative dumpling flavours for this year’s Dragon Boat Festival. Photo: Nicholas Wong/Sixteen Photography

Jade Garden’s sea urchin and fish maw rice dumpling. Photo: Jade Garden

Sweetened red bean and aged tangerine peel rice dumpling at Yue. Photo: Yue

OmniPork vegetarian rice dumpling at Yat Tung Heen at the Eaton HK in Jordan. Photo: Yat Tung Heen

Spring Moon’s rice dumpling is filled with diced abalone, 30-head dried abalone, dried scallops and Jinhua ham. Photo: The Peninsula Hong Kong

The new keto diet-friendly “rice” dumpling from Hong Kong brand Dashijie features cauliflower instead of glutinous rice. Photo: Dashijie

Korean traditional ceramic art in the spotlight as modern-day master hosts Hong Kong show and masterclass

A piece by South Korean buncheong ceramics master Huh Sangwook, who will show his work in an exhibition and lead a three-day buncheong masterclass at Hong Kong’s Lump Studio, from June 8-10. Photo: Lump Studio

Buncheong ceramics by Huh Sangwook. Photo: Lump Studio

For his pieces, Huh says he is inspired by Korean tradition and nature. Photo: Lump Studio

The Chinese families who hid past inter-ethnic mixing, and as a result forgot their own heritage

A drawing of Foochow (Fuzhou), taken from a painting, published in an 1847 book. A British treaty port, Foochow is an example of a community where ethnic mixing between Chinese and non-Chinese occurred but was often concealed. Photo: Getty Images

A drawing of the facade of the A-Ma Temple in Macau from a 19th century book. After Macau’s establishment as a Portuguese trading settlement, family genealogies in the neighbouring Pearl River districts became highly varied. Photo: Getty Images

Peranakan Chinese were the descendants of Chinese immigrants to the Indonesian-Malay Archipelago who married Malays and adopted local Malay customs. Photo: Getty Images

How to write in Chinese faster than in English? Online Chinese typing tools harness predictive text based on pinyin

Zhi Bingyi (left), was one of the key figures in the evolution of Chinese input method, which, after posing problems in its early days, has come on through the use of predictive text to reach levels of speed once unimaginable.

The opening line of one of the most well-known Tang dynasty poems, Farewell, by Wang Wei, can be reproduced in just five keystrokes on a QWERTY keyboard using Chinese input method.

MIT electrical engineer Samuel Caldwell with his invention Sinotype, the first Chinese computer, in the 1950s.

Mao Zedong writes at his desk during the Chinese civil war. The leader was a proponent of the pinyin-isation of Chinese. Photo: Getty Images

A typist in New York in 1946 sits at the first electro-automatic Chinese typewriter, which carried 5,400 ideographic characters commonly used in Chinese writing on a cylinder controlled by a keyboard with 43 keys. Photo: Getty Images

The model 100D-T typewriter by Japanese company Nippon Type, in Japan, in the late 1970s. It came with six cases of Chinese character-type. Photo: Getty Images

“Connected thought” pinyin input became so central to Chinese computing that the term was enshrined in the Chinese name of one of China’s most influential computing companies: Lenovo.

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In exile, poet and statesman Qu Yuan wrote an influential Chinese poem. His death in 278BC sparked the myth behind the Dragon Boat Festival


In exile, poet and statesman Qu Yuan wrote what is regarded as the most innovative and influential work in the history of Chinese poetry. His death inspired the myth behind the Dragon Boat Festival.


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Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


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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