Today is Duanwu, the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival.
Yesterday, I visited Bangkok's Chinatown searching for "Zongzi," known in Thai as "Ba Jang" (from Hokkien Chinese). Zangzi is a traditional Chinese food served at Duanwu. It's made of salted duck egg, sausage, shredded pork, chicken, pork fat, shitake mushrooms, red bean paste, chestnuts and other ingredients in a savory sticky rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves, steamed, and tied up with string.
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| zongzi for sale in Chinatown |
The Dragon Boat Festival, celebrated for hundreds of years in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and other Chinese-speaking areas, has only recently been recongnized by the People's Republic of China. It's once again becoming popular in the mainland.
During this holiday, people get together to celebrate with their families, make and eat zongzi, and watch dragon boat races in the rivers.
The holiday commemorates the death of Chinese poet Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BC), during the Zhou Dynasty. Exiled for his loyalty, Qu Yuan drowned himself in the Miluo River. The local people who loved and admired the poet, raced out in their dragon boats to retrieve his body, and threw sticky rice balls into the river for the fish to eat instead of Qu Yuan's body. Today, some people still throw zongzi into the river to commemorate this, although it's more popular to eat them!
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| there were some zongzi floating in the Chinatown canal |
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