The Dragon Boat Festival falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month every year. The word "Duan" has the meaning of beginning and beginning, and "noon" is homophonic with "five", so it is called "Dragon Boat Festival". Chinese medicine also calls the fifth month of the lunar calendar the month of five poisons. There is a folk proverb that says: "Dragon Boat Festival, the weather is hot, and the five poisons wake up, so there is no peace."

During the Dragon Boat Festival, the climate is rainy and humid, mosquitoes, flies, insects and fungi are active and multiply rapidly, which is easy to breed diseases. In addition, after May, the days become shorter, the nights become longer, and the yang drops, so does the yang of people, and the qi of yin and evil attacks easily.

The ancients regarded May of the lunar calendar as "the month of sanitation and epidemic prevention". The earliest Dragon Boat Festival was a day when people gathered together to "keep healthy, drive away evil spirits and avoid plague". A series of traditional customs of Dragon Boat Festival are related to epidemic prevention.

May is a fire, noon fire is flourishing, and gold gas hurts. Therefore, the ancients lived alone, ate tasteless food, used it moderately, and kept their health unclean. It was the fire that was too strong.

-"Bao Sheng Xin Jian"

1, hanging calamus and wormwood

"On the Dragon Boat Festival on May 5, Shi Tian rode Ai Hu and held a calamus sword, and the god of plague returned to the underworld." This ballad vividly describes the custom of inserting wormwood and calamus on the door of every household during the Dragon Boat Festival to drive away the plague.

Acorus calamus and wormwood are both aromatic plants and can be used as medicine. Acorus calamus has the functions of clearing customs, waking up, eliminating dampness, resolving phlegm and removing filth; The stems and leaves of wormwood contain volatile aromatic oil, which can refresh the mind, enlighten the mind, kill insects, repel mosquitoes, flies and insects, and purify the air. The Dragon Boat Festival coincides with the high incidence in summer, so the ancients often put calamus and wormwood at the door to ward off evil spirits and treat diseases.

Step 2 avoid the five poisons

The ancients in the north regarded the Dragon Boat Festival as a "poisonous day and an evil day" and avoided it. In fact, this is because the summer weather in the north is hot and dry, the plague is easy to spread, and snakes and insects are easy to bite people, which makes the ancient people in the north gradually form customs such as "avoiding the five poisons" and "hiding from the Dragon Boat Festival". Five poisons refer to centipedes, poisonous snakes, scorpions, geckos and toads. These five animals are the five poisons widely circulated in ancient North China.

Step 3 wear five-color silk

In the traditional culture of China, the five colors "blue, red, white, black and yellow" symbolizing the five elements are regarded as auspicious colors. Five-color silk is a colorful rope made of red, green, yellow, white and black thick silk threads, which is a colorful longevity thread. This is an ancient custom in the Song Dynasty. The ancients used it to ward off diseases and evil spirits, and let children avoid the harm of snakes and scorpions.

4, wearing sachets:

According to land records, during the Dragon Boat Festival, "embroidered bags are very small, shaped like purses, with realgar in the middle, which is called realgar purse ... all these are tied between lapels to ward off evil spirits". Dragon Boat Festival "wearing a hundred herbs bag is not afraid of five insects". At present, sachets usually contain some aromatic Chinese medicines, such as Atractylodis Rhizoma, Radix Angelicae Dahuricae, Rhizoma Acori Graminei, Rhizoma Chuanxiong, Gan Song, Rhizoma Kaempferiae, Borneolum Syntheticum, Camphor, etc. It has better detoxification and epidemic prevention effects, and has the functions of fragrance, insect repellent, plague prevention and disease prevention.

5. Mulan soup

The "orchids" here belong to the genus Eupatorium in Compositae. Dragon Boat Festival is in midsummer, and it is a season with frequent skin diseases. The ancients often used bluegrass soup to bathe and decontaminate. The scent of Eupatorium odoratum can dispel dirt and ward off evil spirits, and "bath orchid" can eliminate diseases and epidemics. From a modern point of view, vanilla contains a variety of volatile oils, which have bactericidal and bacteriostatic effects. Cleaning the body with vanilla decoction is effective in preventing diseases and protecting health.

These customs of the Dragon Boat Festival are related to the humid climate around the Dragon Boat Festival. In order to prevent the epidemic of plague, these traditional Chinese medicines are used to drive away filth, detoxify and exorcise evil spirits. These customs reflect the ancient China people's wisdom of keeping in good health, the philosophy of the correspondence between man and nature, and the unity of man and nature, and have strong characteristics of China traditional culture.