June 12th was Dragon Boat Festival (端午節 Duanwu Jie). [1]
Duanwu jie falls on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month of the Chinese calendar. According to Wine For the Gods[2], a book on Taiwanese popular religion, “The Dragon-Boat Festival takes place at a time which is just between spring and summer, a time in which evils may lurk around every corner, so this month is called the ‘month of poison’. In order to expel ghosts, avoid poisons, and preserve health and happiness, there are many popular customs.”
These customs include making bamboo wrapped rice “dumplings” called bazang, the famous dragon boat races, sacrifices to ancestors[3], and the employment of a variety of charms.
Pictured below is a bundle of leaves that appeared on a neighbor’s door, and on the doors of many homes around the area. It’s funny, I can’t remember this as a part of Duanwu jie from my neighbors in Kaohsiung, but the likeliest reason is that I just wasn’t paying much attention. I had to go back to Wine For the Gods to find out what the leaves meant.
Each family binds up calamus leaves, bitter herbs, and banian branches into a bunch with a red ribbon, and then hangs it outside the door. The reason for this lies in the fact that calamus leaves are shaped somewhat like a sword, so are believed to dispel evil. Also, the Taiwanese word for bitter herbs is pronounced like he word for good health, so they are used as a means of ensuring bodily fitness. Thirdly, the significance of the banian branch is also to dispel evil influences.”
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[1] I’m actually terribly unsatisfied with the English name for the day, which has to do with a lot more than dragon boat racing. But duanwu 端午 doesn’t lend itself to an immediately obvious English rendering, so unless someone can suggest one to me, Dragon Boat it will have to be. I’ll use the Mandarin pinyin for the festival throughout this entry, however.
[2] This out of print book, published in 1976 in Taiwan, was co-written by an Australian woman and a Taiwanese man . It’s entirely unfootnoted and I’d never use it as a source for research, but it’s a great handbook for day-to-day use. Its narrative style is rather quaint, for example, regarding the Australian author: “although Miss Coutanceau’s Mandarin is fluent, the intricacies of the Taiwanese tongue are as yet a garden unexplored for her.”
[3] Around noon, it seemed like everyone in our neighborhood burnt paper money at the same time – leading Gene and I to feel mildly poisoned from smoke inhalation for the rest of the day, even though we’d had our windows and doors closed. Ugh. Normally I’m not bothered by the biweekly offerings to Tudigong, but I think that’s because fewer people do them.
I don’t remember this either. Is it possibly a northern custom? Or maybe I wasn’t paying very good attention either.
It may very well be a northern thing. I hadn’t seen anything like it before.