China to celebrate Dragon Boat festival
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In addition to traditional festivities such as dragon boat races and rice dumpling feasts , the to-do-list for this year's Dragon Boat festival has two new items: touring the Shanghai World Expo and watching World Cup football.
The festival, which falls on Wednesday, arises from the legend of Qu Yuan (340 BC - 278 BC), a romantic poet and minister to the king of Chu who drowned himself after he was forced into exile.
According to the legend, fishermen raced to Qu Yuan's aid in their boats but could not save him, so they splashed their oars to ward off evil spirits and threw rice dumplings into the river to honor his heroism.
Like any other year, this year's three-day holiday season, beginning Monday, will observe the traditions of boat races, folk entertainment and memorial ceremonies being held across China.
This is the first year of the celebration since the Chinese Dragon Boat festival was proclaimed an intangible world heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2009.
In Zigui county, the poet's hometown in central China's Hubei Province, a series of events have been planned to mark this year's festival.
On the festival day, the renovated memorial temple of Qu Yuan will open to public. The temple was relocated to its current site in 2006 to make way for the Three-Gorges Dam.
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