Dragon boat season has begun.
For most of the year, the dragon boats of the ancient families of Nancun are buried in mud at the bottom of the river that winds around and through the village. At the start of the Dragon Boat Festival, the boats are excavated, washed, and prepared for the season’s voyaging and racing.
Dragon Boat Festival is a public holiday even though it goes uncelebrated by most Chinese people. There are nevertheless special sales in shops as well as a seasonal culinary delight, the zongzi 粽子 (sticky rice dumplings) that restaurant chains now market in increasingly elaborate flavours and packaging.
Guangzhou’s dragon boat races, of various degrees of seriousness and athleticism, can be large-scale events, attracting crowds of spectators in the thousands and broadcast live on TV. However, dragon boats are also involved in a series of ritual activities that renew the bonds between families, villages, and the river.
On 5 June 2024 (the 29th day of the fourth lunar month), the Peng family of Nancun Village held its cai qing 采青 (Plucking the Greens)ceremony. Over the past year and a half, I’ve become familiar with the Pengs, attending social events and regularly visiting their ancestral hall in the village.
I was invited together with some colleagues and students to participate in this year’s cai qing activities, starting with lunch in the ancestral hall. We were served pork fat and chicken foot soup, green beans with sliced pork belly, glass noodles, fried egg with vegetables, and bundles of boiled unlaid eggs with vegetables. One of our tablemates showed off a bottle of baiju 白酒 (white liquor), and reciprocal toasts were made throughout the meal. Such toasting typically involves heavy drinking, but in this case, the coming boat outing meant it was more symbolic, and the baiju was sipped rather than downed in shots.
During lunch, I learned I’d been invited to join the men on the boat trip. Although historical records show that women previously engaged in boat-related and water-based work in Guangzhou, the dragon boat itself is regarded as a male space, at least for the Peng family. After lunch, I was given a lifejacket and an oar and then led down the alley to the docking site on the river.
I was seated in the middle of the craft, taking my place alongside and in front of two experienced rowers, with another unexperienced younger man in front of me. It being noon on a Tuesday, most of the other men on the boat were retired older men who live in the village. Weekend and holiday activities attract more younger family members, including those who live outside the village.
The flags were raised, the drums began ringing, and we set off, first backing up slightly and then turning with the river as it split beneath a bridge and flowed away from Nancun, into Shitou, and out toward the Pearl River.
The beating drums made it easy for me to maintain an even stroke, and each time we passed beneath a bridge, a chant went up, echoing off the concrete and the water. People walking or driving mopeds alongside the river stopped as we passed, sometimes taking photos, sometimes just watching.
As we turned one bend in the river, our leader called out for us to stop rowing. Farther along the river, a floodgate was down, a slab of metal blocking the flow. After a few minutes, the gate slowly lifted (whether for our sake or according to some prior plan, I cannot say), and a pulse of water—and a fair amount of rubbish—sped upriver toward us. We needed to row hard against it until we made it past the gate.
We at last came out into the Pearl River itself, the small island of Liyugang rising high from the brown delta waters and the larger Xiaoguwei island forming the bank opposite. We turned west, sticking close to shore until we came up to a tangle of reeds, brush, and bulging earth valiantly held back by canvas, slats of wood, and metal posts. Atop a little bluff, a couple were having wedding photos taken on a green open space, backed by residential skyscrapers but featuring a Hobbit-style semi-subterranean house and a picturesque old-fashioned camper van.
We lacked, it seemed, a place to land the boat. I had the impression that a landing place had existed at this spot but was now gone, perhaps flooded by the extremely wet spring or lost to a piece of landscape engineering. We lingered there, just offshore, mavoeuvering slightly forward and back again, seeking a place to stop but not finding one.
I watched barges sail past in the distance, a reminder of Guangzhou’s history as one of China’s great port cities. So much was moving, so much was always changing, yet itself is part of the city’s character.
A young man lowered himself from the boat and into the water, which came up above his waist. He moved slowly back past the stern and toward a clump of weeds in the mud, returning with some long stalks of grass—leaves, stems, roots, earth, and all. Then he waded forward again and handed the plants to the men at the bow.
At this time, a basin was passed back through the boat, with broad leaves (presumably brought from Nancun) being used to splash river water onto all the rowers.
After this, we started our return trip to the village. Small fireworks were thrown from the bow out onto the river at intervals. The drums beat more loudly now, and our rowing rhythm was varied in accordance with rules I did not understand. Sometimes, as we passed under bridges and through tunnels, the boat was made to bounce up and down, a dragon dancing on the water.
When we were once more in Nancun Village, rather than landing immediately, we made a number of trips up and down the short stretch of river between our dock and the ancient garden of Yuyin Shanfang. Each time we changed direction, it required the rowers to stand, swivel around, and switch seats with the person who had previously sat in front of them.
We eventually pulled up and docked, then exited the boat and returned to the ancestral hall, where Dragon Boat Festival cookies and cakes were already laid out on the table. A woman chopped up large watermelon directly on the table and served it to the rowers.
I could depart that afternoon knowing the boat was ready for the celebrations to come.