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Dragon boat festival:
The Dragon boat festival or Duanwu Festival is a customary and constitutional holiday connected with Chinese cultures. This dragon boat festival is also renowned in other East Asian and Southeast Asian societies as well. The day of the dragon boat festival is a community holiday in Taiwan. This Dragon boat festival is renowned in Hong Kong and Macau, where this Dragon boat festival is known by the Cantonese name Tuen Ng Jit. In 2008, the Dragon boat festival was restored in China as an official state holiday. The Dragon boat festival is also celebrated in countries with major Chinese populations, such as in Singapore and Malaysia.
Corresponding and related festivals like Dragon boat festival which are celebrated outside Chinese speaking societies include the Kodomo no hi in Japan, Dano in Korea, and Tet Doan Ng? in Vietnam. The Dragon boat festival occurs on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar. In 2009 this Dragon boat festival cascade on May 28 and in 2010 on June 16. The hub of the celebrations of this Dragon boat festival includes eating zongzi, which are large rice wraps, drinking realgar wine, and racing dragon boats.
In May 2009, the Chinese government designated the Dragon boat festival for addition in UNESCO global Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The Dragon boat festival is believed to have originated in ancient China. A number of theories exist about this Dragon boat festival and a number of folk and descriptive myths are connected to it. Today the best known of this Dragon boat festival relates to the suicide in 278 BC of Qu Yuan, poet and statesman of the Chu kingdom during the Warring States period. People, who admired him, threw food into the river to feed the fish so that they would not eat Qu Yuan body.
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