Staged Authenticity

Dragon boat festival

An example of staged authenticity is Chinese Dragon boat festival. Dragon boat festival is an official holiday in China, and has been listed into the book of world Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Dragon boat festival was originated from China in order to commemorate a famous poet Qu Yuan in Chinese Chunqiu period, Qu yuan is a poet and also a minister of the Chu huai king. He was trying to make Chu a prosperous country with a powerful army, and ally Qi to against powerful Qin. In addition, Qin later became the first kingdom who united the land of China in Chinese history. The king did not take his advise and his country Chu was eliminated by Qin. After wrote his last poem Huaisha, he jumped into the Poluo river with grief and indignation.

People then commemorate him in different ways. There is a custom that we throw prepared rice roll into the river or lake on that day he died, to avoid fish, shrimp and crab to bite Qu yuan’s body. Another custom is we pour yellow wine into the river, in order to make monsters and dragon drunk, so that they will not hurt his body. People concerned that the rice roll eaten by dragon in the river, so the rice roll evolved to modern rice-pudding with leaves wrapped.

When I was in elementary school, I had several traditional Chinese Dragon boat festival with my grandparents, which was very impressive and memorable.

Rice pudding also called rice dumpling, it created because of famous poet Qu yuan, on that day, people make and give each other rice dumpling as a gift, it is the most well known traditional Chinese food up to now. On the first week of May, people started to be busy with soaking sticky rice, soaking and washing special leaves for rice dumping and making rice dumpling. First of all, we prepared Ruoye in advance, soaking is an important step because soaked Ruoye affects the taste of rice dumpling, soft and flexible leaves are easy to fold, wrap and shape the rice dumping....