It is said that the custom of eating zongzi and racing dragon boats on the Dragon Boat Festival is to commemorate Qu Yuan, a great poet in the history of China. It is precisely because of this that the Dragon Boat Festival was named "Poet's Day" after liberation.
Qu Ping (about 339 BC ~ about 278 BC) was originally named Qu Yuan, but was also named after Regular Cloud. Han nationality, a native of Danyang (now Zigui, Hubei) at the end of the Warring States Period, is a descendant of Qu Xian, the son of Chu Wuwang Xiong Tong. Although Qu Yuan was loyal to Chu Huaiwang, he was repeatedly rejected. After the death of King Huai, Xiang Wang was exiled because he listened to slanderers, and finally died in the Miluo River.
Qu Yuan is one of the greatest romantic poets in China, and also the earliest known famous poet and world cultural celebrity in China. He initiated the style of "Chu Ci" and the tradition of "vanilla beauty". His representative works include Li Sao and Nine Songs.
In the history of our country, the saying that the Dragon Boat Festival is to commemorate Qu Yuan has a history of 1500 years. According to legend, after Qu Yuan threw himself into the Miluo River, the local people immediately rowed for rescue, and all the way to Dongting Lake, but Qu Yuan's body was never seen. It was raining at that time, and the boats on the lake gathered at the pavilion on the shore. When people learned that it was to salvage the sage Dr. Qu, they went out in the rain and rushed into the vast Dongting Lake. In order to mourn, people rowed on rivers, and later it gradually developed into a dragon boat race. People were afraid that fish in the river would eat his body, so they went home and threw rice balls into the river to prevent fish and shrimp from ruining Qu Yuan's body. Later, eating zongzi became a custom.