Nothing is quite as colourful, noisy and downright Chinese as a dragon boat race. Roaring spectators, pounding drums, churning white water and exploding firecrackers make enough noise to deafen the gods. Chinese often use the word renao to describe dragon boat races. Renao literally means “hot and noisy” and has a very positive meaning (translate as lively/bustling). Over the past two decades dragon boat fever has spread far and wide so that now everyone from English grocers to Midwestern soccer moms can be found donning coloured headbands and chopping madly at the water.

Legend has it that the custom of dragon boat racing began over 2300 years ago with the drowning suicide of poet Qu Yuan. When fishermen failed to save him, they beat the water with their paddles and threw rice dumplings into the river to keep the fish from eating his body. However, the history of dragon boat racing as we know it today is surprisingly short. The International Dragon Boat Federation was only established in 1991. Even in the birthplace of modern dragon boating, Hong Kong, the local Dragon Boat Association only dates back to 1976. Perhaps dragon boat racing is not so ancient after all. Maybe the myth of the drowning poet is simply a fig leaf covering a very recent fiction. Social scientists enjoy nothing more than sneaking up on such sacred cows and tipping them over. As it happens, Chinese dragon boat racing traditions are not as recent or as one-dimensional as they might appear at first glance.

For one thing dragon boat racing traditions vary greatly from region to region. In the fishing villages in and around Hong Kong, for instance, the dragon boat festival is bound up with the worship of Tin Hau, the sea goddess. Fishermen place her statue on the dragon boat to pay their respects and pray for good catches and calm seas throughout the coming year. In Xianyou County, Fujian Province, locals race boats two months earlier, on the 30th of March, to commemorate the deaths of Song Dynasty loyalists who refused to surrender to the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty. Xianyou oarsmen keep time by singing the verse:

Strike the drum!
Strike the drum!
Sing of spring!
Sing of spring!
Mourn loyal souls!
Though spring light fades
It will return!
The loyal soul roams
One thousand years!

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When the New Number Two Primary School fell, parents, relatives and friends of pupils rushed to the site. Sang Jun arrived about 20 minutes after the earthquake to look for his son. “There were already five people digging,” said Sang. He jumped in to help. His arms and legs, like Bi’s and other parents here, are now scarred with scrapes and bruises from the frantic efforts to pull apart the rubble and get to their kids below. Holding a pair of dirty blue jeans and a blue work shirt stained with blood, Sang said: “I was wearing these. I pulled out more than 20 children … Only five were alive.”

Zhang Chao was recovering from surgery in a hospital nearby. When he heard the school was demolished, he got up and went to help, pulling several bodies from the wreckage.

Down the road, a hefty farmer with a buzz cut named Zuo Jun hobbles with a crutch along a dirt path beside a golden field of wheat. Zuo injured his left foot prying through the rubble in search of his 11-year-old son, Zuo Hao, who appears pudgy with a crew cut and a jovial smile in family photos. At the end of the raised path in the corner of the field is a mound of fresh dirt where Hao is buried. “If the teachers had been there, he would be alive,” said Zuo with a pained look. “During the lunch break, the teachers put two classes together, locked them in and then went to play mahjong. This is what students said.”

“Did quake really kill my little girl?”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 16th May, 2008

Jiang, who comes from distant Kaili city in Guizhou province, was working in the highway administration department in Yingxiu, the town in Wenchuan County at the epicentre of last Monday’s quake. Jiang was working the night shift, so was asleep at the Yingdian Hotel when China’s worst natural disaster in a generation struck at 2.28pm. “I was buried in complete darkness, but my quilt was covering my body; that must have protected me,” he said. “I knew that I wanted to live. I didn’t want my parents to grieve for me. Their voices, telling me to work well before I left home for Sichuan, echoed from time to time in my ears in that darkness.

Jiang’s mother, Long Jinyu, a 52-year-old administrative worker at a vocational school, flew into Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, at 4am on Saturday, then took a taxi out to Dujiangyan city… Police and soldiers were preventing civilians from going any further… They would not let her continue, but when they were distracted, she began to climb the mountain. “I kept scrambling up, sometimes on my feet, sometimes on my hands and knees. I don’t know where my strength came from. I caught up with a team of soldiers heading the same way. I was the only civilian there.” Running over in her mind as she kept travelling on were the words, “Son, hold on, Mum is coming to help you.” When she arrived at the ruins of the town, a firefighter told her a quite stable signal had been found where the Yingdian Hotel had been, indicating there was still one person alive, buried under the pile of tiles and bricks. “I ran up to the ruins, and shouted into them, ‘Erge, Erge!’ - my son’s special pet name from when he was little. “And I heard him answer ‘Mum’. It was like a voice from heaven. I can’t tell you how I felt.

“Mother’s voice saves son”, The Australian, Monday 19th May, 2008

Chongqing Dog (Chongqing quan)

This remarkable looking dog is found only in Chongqing City and eastern Sichuan province. The Chongqing is a distinct and ancient bloodline with no genetic connection to the boxer, despite possessing a strong resemblance to that family of dogs. They were traditionally used by officials and gentry for hunting, to guard property and as status symbols. The breed is even rarer than the panda and little known even inside China. Owners say the Chongqing is a noble, loyal and very intelligent dog.

Formosan Mountain Dog (Taiwan quan)

The Formosan Mountain Dog category contains a variety of indigenous Taiwanese dogs that are defined by great athleticism, triangular features and large, upright ears. They are closely related to other primitive or original Asian dogs and are ideally adapted to living and hunting in Taiwan’s thickly forested mountains. Due to centuries of interbreeding with imported dogs, today very few pure blood Formosan Mountain dogs remain; however, their genetic legacy is evident in street dogs all over the island.

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155 A.D.
Repeated attempts to make pandas fight in the colosseum end in failure.

695 A.D.
Japanese Empress Jitō asks Chinese Empress Wu Zetian to send a panda for her garden. The Japanese are outraged the following year when an exhaustive list of tribute demands arrives written on a sheet of panda skin.

1925
Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. earn the dubious distinction of being the first foreigners to shoot a panda… at the Bronx Zoo. The teenaged Chiang Chingkuo shoots a bison at Beijing Zoo in retaliation.

1964
The transfer of a panda from London zoo to Moscow provokes clashes along the Sino-Soviet border. Hostilities only cease when Chichi is smuggled back into West Berlin in the trunk of a black and white Trabant.

2005
China offers two pandas to Taiwan, but because pandas are called bearcats in China and catbears in Taiwan, customs turns them away on the grounds that the shipment’s contents do not match their description.

* May not correspond to historical reality.