Dragon Boat Racing: the Historical and Cultural Tie of the Chinese
Jinze Bi (1, 2), Zhen Guo (1)

1 The Division of Sports Science and Physical Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing China
2 The School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing China

Abstract

Dragon boat racing is recognised as the most prominent form of boat racing in China, because of both its thousand-year history and its significance in the Chinese culture, though the term dragon boat racing is created and used more recently than the sport per se. The study embraces a three-fold aim, which is to examine a) the development of the sport in China, b) the changes and continuities in the interpretation of sport throughout the history, and c) the way in which the significance endowed with the sport affect the Chinese community within and beyond the boarder of the PRC. Through analysing archival documents, including academic literatures, historical archives and archaeological reports, it is revealed that 1) the development of the shape and decoration of the boat, from canoe to bird-headed boat, dragon-decorated boat and eventually dragon boat, reflects a gradual integration of the sport into traditional Chinese culture, the development of which varies from one region to another, 2) even though interpretations of the culture of boat racing embraces temporal and spatial heterogeneity, there has been a consistently homogeneous understanding of dragon boat racing since the establishment of the dragon shape and decoration of the boat, and 3) for the Chinese, dragon boat racing provides a important field to construct the shared beliefs, cultural community and national identity, at least in ethnic nationalist terms, in various ways.

Keywords: dragon boat racing- historical- cultural

Topic: Traditional sports and physical culture in Asia