"Qu Yuan belongs not only to Yichang City, but also the world and all mankind," 
Wang Li, vice governor of central China's Hubei Province and top official of 
Yichang City, said emotionally as he addressed the opening ceremony of the 2022 
Qu Yuan's Hometown Dragon Boat Culture Festival held on June 2 in Yichang.

Yichang is the hometown of Qu Yuan, a well-known poet and a minister of the 
State of Chu during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), whose death was 
closely related with the origin of China's Dragon Boat Festival, a day 
traditionally marked with dragon boat races and eating Zongzi, a pyramid-shaped 
dumpling made of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves.

After the opening ceremony, a grand original performance named "China in the 
songs of Chu Kingdom" was staged. Fifteen programs in various forms, including 
song and dance, drum performance, acrobatics and rap, presented a cultural 
audio-visual feast to audiences at home and abroad, according to the Publicity 
Department of Yichang Municipality.

On June 3, a total of 16 teams with over 400 participants from Hubei, Hunan, 
Jiangxi, Guangdong and other provincial regions competed in a dragon boat race 
in Yichang's Zigui County with the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam to 
celebrate the traditional Chinese festival.

Yichang's Dragon Boat Culture Festival activities seek to present the city's 
rich cultural deposits related with Qu Yuan. In addition to the opening 
ceremony, a dragon boat race, an investment match-making meeting, folk 
performances and other activities, the first Qu Yuan culture research 
international forum, the annual meeting of the Chinese Association of Qu Yuan, 
a global collection of works on Qu Yuan from young writers and other activities 
were also held.

As a national Dragon Boat Festival event, the Qu Yuan's hometown Dragon Boat 
Culture Festival has been held six times, with an average of 150,000 visits 
each year. In 2009, the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival, with Qu Yuan's hometown 
Dragon Boat Culture Festival as its main content, was inscribed on the UNESCO 
Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Therefore, 
Dragon Boat Festival has become a thousand-year-old cultural event and a 
cultural symbol with global influence in Qu Yuan's hometown of Yichang.

Source: Publicity Department of Yichang Municipality

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   Caption: The dragon boat race