Miluo is a county-level city under Yueyang, and the river of the same name is the longest watercourse in the prefecture, running 253 kilometres from the eastern hills before it enters Dongting Lake. Its fame comes from a drowning. Qu Yuan (屈原), born into the royal clan of the state of Chu around 340 BC in the Warring States period, served King Huai as Left Minister and later held the office of Overseer of the Three Wards, keeper of the rites and registers of the three royal clans. Court intrigue did what foreign armies could not: slandered by rival ministers, he was exiled, and in his banishment in the lake country he collected folk songs and legends and wrote the poems — 'Li Sao' above all — that made him the first Chinese poet known to history by name. In 278 BC the Qin general Bai Qi took Chu's capital, Ying. Tradition says that Qu Yuan, in despair at the news, waded into the Miluo holding a rock, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. The river kept the date. Everything told on that water since has been an answer to his death.
From the journal
The river where the boat races begin
At Miluo, the poet Qu Yuan walked into the river in 278 BC, and the boats that went after him became dragon boat racing. The story, the races and the festival that now fills the national calendar begin on this water.
In the same city · Yueyang ↗The poet and the river
The boats on the water
The legend of what happened next is told in one breath. Villagers saw him go under and put out in their boats, carrying their rice dumplings to the middle of the river; they were too late. To keep fish and evil spirits away from the body they beat drums and splashed the water with their paddles, and threw rice in both as an offering to his spirit and to distract the fish. The failed rescue hardened into custom. Boats went out on the anniversary of his death — the fifth day of the fifth lunar month — and the act of racing to search for his body gradually became the cultural tradition of dragon boat racing, held on that date every year. From this river the custom is said to have spread across the Chinese-speaking world: Japan, Korea and Vietnam each keep a version of the fifth-day festival. Miluo's claim to be the starting point is written into the record, not just the legend: Chinese accounts call the Miluo the birthplace of Chinese dragon boat culture, and in 1995 the river city hosted the first World Dragon Boat Championship, bringing the sport's world title back to the water where it is said to have begun. The drums and paddles of the oldest story are still the working parts of every race.
The festival today
The fifth day of the fifth lunar month is now the Dragon Boat Festival, and since 2008 it has been a national public holiday in China. What began as a village rescue is a state occasion. Crews race; families cook zongzi, the sticky-rice parcels wrapped in leaves that descend, says the legend, from the three-cornered silk packages Qu Yuan's spirit asked his friends to cast in, so that the river dragon would take the rice and spare his body. At Miluo the day is also a literary commemoration: the Qu Zi shrine and the Sao Altar stand by the river as memorials to the poet, in a prefecture that honours Qu Yuan as a world-famous man of letters. Honours of a stranger kind have followed the poems — China's Mars exploration programme is named Tianwen, 'heavenly questions', after one of his works. The festival's centre of gravity long ago spread to the whole country and beyond, with versions in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. But the river keeps the oldest job. Once a year, on the fifth day of the fifth month, boats go out on the Miluo and beat the water, looking for a man who has been dead for more than twenty-two centuries.