SOURCE: "Rites of Summer: Ch'ü Yuan in the Folk Tradition" in A Madman of Ch'u, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, pp. 125-57.

[In the following excerpt, Schneider analyzes the formation and evolution of the Chu Yuan folk cult and explores the purpose of some of the mythical elements concerning the poet.]

Tungting Hill floats on the lake. At its foot are hundreds of gilded halls where the jade virgins dwell, and music in every season carries to the crest of the hill. King Huai of Ch 'u made talented men compose poems by the lake …[and later he] gave ear to evil ministers and all the good men fled. Ch'u Yuian, dismissed for his loyalty, lived as a hermit among the weeds, consorting with birds and beasts and having no traffic with the world. He ate cypress nuts and mixed them with cassia oil to cultivate his heart until, hounded by the king, he drowned himself in the limpid stream. The people of Ch'u mourned his loss bitterly and believed he had become a water saint. His spirit wanders through the Milky Way, descending on occasion to the River Hsiang. The people of Ch'u set up a shrine for him which was still standing at the end of the Han dynasty.
Forgotten Tales (Shih i chi),
Fourth Century A.D.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia's reverence for Ch'ü Yüan was interwoven with their growing awareness and appreciation of folk culture. A characteristic of the new literature written about Ch'ü Yüan was an argument for his close association with the common people. This was true even of those who saw him as a transcendent superman, or a prophet without honor in his own land. The legitimacy and value of his example were argued on the basis of his understanding of the people's suffering and his desire to help them. For those intellectuals who depicted Ch'ü Yüan as a commoner himself, it was that much easier to link his politics and art to folk culture. In either case, the same datum was repeatedly adduced to demonstrate that he was indeed a people's poet. This was the central role he played, reputedly since the time of his death in the third century B.C., in the cluster of customs and festivals celebrated throughout south China in early summer. Here was irrefutable evidence, it was argued, that the masses themselves recognized Ch'ü Yüan's association with their lives and interests, and that ultimately he was one of them.

Though it will mean stepping back in time, I explore the folk cult of Ch'ü Yüan at this point, in the midst of our discussion of twentieth century China, for a number of reasons. First, because I have wanted to develop an uninterrupted narrative of the lore as it has evolved in the literary tradition up to this point. Second, because it is not until this time in history that Chinese intellectuals show a sustained consciousness of folk culture and make it a basic category of Chinese civilization. The entire tradition of Ch'ü Yüan is transformed by this new consciousness which, among other things, results in the idea of Ch'ü Yüan as a revolutionary people's poet.

One of the signal features of the intellectual tradition of modern China is its claim to the discovery of an indigenous folk tradition in China's past. Once having made the discovery, many prominent intellectual leaders have then gone on to conclude that this was the "true" and essential tradition of Chinese culture, and that it, in its contemporary forms, must be the inspiration and point of departure for China's new culture. Thus, beginning in the 1920s, some of China's most prominent scholars and poets devoted themselves to reconstructing one or another aspect of China's past folk cultures, laying particular emphasis on folk poetry, song, and story. Much effort was spent to learn which of the most ancient and venerated literary monuments (like the Odes and the Ch'u Tz'u) were in fact records of the oral tradition, or at least were inspired by it. And fruitful results were obtained by applying to these efforts newly learned Western techniques and concepts of mythography and folklore.

However sophisticated these endeavors were, and whatever useful knowledge they imparted, they nearly all shared a common sociological theme which often served to obscure more than it revealed. This was the theme of the antithetic "two cultures"—of the "people" and of the "aristocracy"—locked in a perennial adversary relationship. Even before the application of a Marxist dialectical approach to the role of "the people" in Chinese history, it was being argued that the people's culture was the source of all progressive cultural innovation in China. What had been innovative and of value for China in the aristocratic (read: ruling class) tradition was considered to be merely "imitative" and derived from the folk. When we consider the relationship of the Ch'ü Yüan folk and elite traditions, these generalizations may be found simplistic and misleading.

My goals in this section are first to provide a detailed analysis of the evolution of the Ch'üu Yüan folk cult so that we may further appreciate how the myth as a whole was conveyed and what it conveyed. In this way we can see more precisely what legacies were available to the modern intelligentsia for its populist transformation of Ch'ü Yüan. Then, on the basis of these details, I want to speculate briefly how the so-called elite and folk traditions of Ch'ü Yüan might be related to each other. And finally, the details of the folk cult will provide material for indicating some of the broad continuities and changes which have occurred in the Ch'ü Yüan lore up to the time of the People's Republic. Though we will go back in time to the formative period of the myth, we shall be talking about the folk tradition in familiar terms. The themes we have seen emerge from Han times through the modern Republic will structure our discussion here, albeit changed into forms that have had immediacy to the lives of Chinese from all walks of life. Central among these are the themes of sacrificial death and regenerative power, the passage of time and cosmic order.

As early as the second century A.D., in the last years of the Han dynasty, the image of Ch'ü Yüan was becoming closely associated with a number of the folk customs of south China. Around the figure of the "loyal and pure" minister who drowned himself there coalesced celebrations of the summer solstice, and a variety of festivals and rites associated with water. All of these customs originally had been independent of one another, yet by the sixth century they had become linked together and with the classical myth of Ch'ü Yüan. This chain comprised the summer solstice festival known best as Tuan Wu, the eating and offering as a sacrifice of the tsung-tzu rice dumplings, the use of long-life threads (ch'ang-ming-lu) to ward off evil influences, and the Dragon Boat Festival (Lung-chou-chieh).

These folk customs and the Han myth of Ch'u Yuan provided reciprocal services one to another. The customs, still practiced throughout the Chinese-speaking world, served to bring Ch'ü Yüan beyond the confines of official literary culture and to make him a very familiar and sympathetic figure in the oral tradition of south China, a principal in one of China's three or four most important calendar festivals. In turn, the Ch'ü Yüan lore of Han provided a logic, a force around which there arranged themselves disparate and sometimes seemingly contradictory elements of folk culture. The logic which informs the political mythology of Ch'ü Yüan in the Han is continuous and apposite, if not identical, with the logic of these united customs. Reconstructing it will help us to understand how Ch'ü Yüan came to be the center of independent customs and festivals with which he originally had no relation and indeed which often first celebrated some other figure. And we shall see how customs and festivals from different regions of south China conflate in Ch'ü Yüan's home territory of Ch'ü (today's Hunan and Hupei provinces).

The Summer Solstice and Evil Days

There are two clusters of customs which are associated with Ch'ü Yüan: those of the summer solstice,¹ and those concerned with boat festivals and making sacrifices related to water. On the lunar calendar, the fifth day of the fifth month is the conventional date for celebrating as a whole, and on Ch'ü Yüan's behalf, these originally independent customs. We shall consider first the solstice customs and the sense of danger associated with them. The Fifth of the Fifth, the day of Ch'ü Yüan's drowning, has been considered an evil day since the Warring States period (fourth century B.C.),² and has typically been treated as a time for the exorcism of harmful influences since Han times. All customs of the festival, W. Eberhard's research shows, "were to provide protection against poisonous animals of darkness, or they were to utilize the forces emanating from the battle between animals of darkness and animals of the sun (fire). [And] the customs were to protect people from war …which is male and fire."³ Very prominent in the lore is the belief that a child born on this day or even in this month would kill its father or both parents.⁴ So it is a time to exercise precautions: the home is swept clean; amulets are worn or hung from the doorways; baths are taken and special foods are eaten.⁵ Already in Han times, red and multicolored silk was hung from doors for the protection it was believed to provide against evil forces at this time of the year.⁶

The special power, and danger, assigned to this day comes from the achievement of fullness of the cosmic principle of yang, the sun (light, maleness). Though the sun will imminently yield to its alternating and complementary principle, the yin, for the moment it is at its fullest strength, and humans must take compensatory actions. Thus, a child born at this time would be super-charged with "maleness" and hence be of danger to the parents. "People such as these," Eberhard notes,

resemble in their actions the owl Hsiao, [an animal of darkness], whose young kill their mother. This owl was used to make broth which was consumed on that day. The owl, furthermore, steals children's souls; therefore one must not put bedding [i.e. accoutrements of the night] out into the sun on this day which is the owl's day. Around this day the souls of [humans] are undergoing changes, and therefore it is particularly easy for the owl to steal the soul. For the same reason one must not climb on the roof on this day. This taboo [fits] with the concept of "calling the soul to return" (chao-hun) [associated with Ch'ü Yüan].⁷

We shall see that Ch'u Yuan is very much associated with the complement of the yang principle, that is, with yin—femaleness, the moon, darkness, and water. And by way of transition to a fuller consideration, let us look at two bits of lore which are perhaps only intelligible in the context of Tuan Wu. In an eclectic little T'ang dynasty treatise called the "Unofficial Biography of Ch'ü Yüan" the putative author, Shen Ochih, retells the story of how Ch'u Yuan came to write his poem Heavenly Questions. Drawing inspiration from the iconography of the king's temple, Ch'ü Yüan began to compose his poem, and then "bright day turned into darkest night and remained so for three days." Shen relates (with charming precision) another anecdote that also seems to make some sense in our present discussion. A man of the Tsin period (ca. A.D. 371) by the name of Yen Yiu of Wu (the lower Yangtze Valley) was sitting in a boat anchored near the shore of the Milo River (in which Ch'ü Yüan drowned). One moonlit night he heard someone singing a phrase from Ch'u Yuan's poem about the fall of the capital of Ch'u. What he saw was "weird" and he called out to the singer, "Are you Ch'ü Yüan?" The singer suddenly disappeared.⁸

Water Rites: Sacrificial Drowning

Tuan Wu, or the Fifth of the Fifth, originally had nothing to do with water rites. Indeed, up to recent times, some people have celebrated the former independently of the latter. However, sometime in the period of Northern and Southern division, fourth to sixth centuries A.D., old traditions of sacrificial drowning came to be associated with Tuan Wu.

Accounts of the sacrifice of human beings to the rivers of China can be found in Han texts. In the following summary of such accounts, north China is the focus, but the roles of the shaman and the female sacrificial bride-victim are of special importance to the Ch'ü Yüan lore which developed in the South.

The River God had to be appeased by giving him "wives." We read that at Yeh, in the extreme north of Honan, it was the custom c. 400 B.C. to give the god a wife every year. The shamans went round from house to house looking for a particularly pretty girl. When they found her they gave her a good bath, dressed her in the finest silks and housed her in a special "house of purification" on the river bank, where she lived in seclusion behind red curtains. After ten days or more they powdered her face and decked her out as a bride and set her afloat on a thing shaped like a bridal bed. After drifting some 10 1i (five or six miles) down stream the bridal-raft sank and disappeared. "People with handsome daughters," we are told, "fearing that the shaman would take them to 'marry' to the River God, used to flee with their daughters to distant parts." The place where the victims were launched was still shown in the sixth century A.D. It was on the banks of the River Chang which now flows into the sea, but may then have been a tributary or sub-tributary of the Yellow River. Sometimes these sacrifices were made to appease the god when his waters were tampered with.⁹

Whether or not this particular form of mock-wedding sacrifice took place in the South, there is ample evidence from the lower Yangtze Valley and down into the southern Yueh region (Kwangtung, Kwangsi) for a tradition of sacrificing women by drowning or making sacrifices to drowned women. For example, "sacrifices were made to drowned women by sinking into water fruit wrapped in orchid or other leaves and tied with colored ribbons, as protection against the Chiao [malevolent] dragons."¹⁰ Additionally there are the Hsiang River goddesses to whom temples were built in Yung chou, Hunan. They were said to live in Tung-t'ing Lake and were considered to be moon goddesses as well.¹¹ Eberhard's classifications show that actually there are two myth cycles on the theme of the drowned woman, only one of which is connected with the festival of the fifty day of the fifth month:

One [features] the idea—which belongs to the Yao culture—of the drowned women who became the patron goddesses of the river festivals; the other one—which belongs to the Thai culture—[links] the concept of the fifth day of the fifth moon with the sacrifices that must be offered to the evil demons living in the rivers.¹²

Edward Schafer's pursuit of these goddesses, in his study The Divine Woman, has demonstrated how the popular cult of the "deified drowned woman, often a suicide"—as well as many prominent female water deities of the southern rivers—were by T'ang times either forgotten or lost through masculinization.¹³ His sensitive reconstruction of the lore of these goddesses, of their expression of the female quintessence, and of their cosmic significance provides us the best available key to the legacy which the figure of Ch'ü Yüan inherited when it became a principal in the river sacrifice cult. Life-giving water is of course central to the chain of symbols linked to the ancient notions of women, "who represented metaphysical water in human form"¹⁴—rain and rainbows, rivers, lakes, and tidal flows, and by extension the moon which regulated the flow from above, and the dragon which often exercised its control from its abode below the water's surface.¹⁵

In the literature explored by Schafer, as with the customs we are presently discussing, the dragon symbol is often ambivalent and its sex ambiguous. For example, the fifth moon water sacrifices and rites associated with Ch'ü Yüan implicitly distinguish between the good dragons (lung) and the bad ones (chiao), who must be propitiated or diverted lest they devour the drowned corpse.¹⁶ Though the dragon had begun to take on masculine attributes by T'ang times, Schafer shows that "in China, dragon essence is woman essence."

The connection is through the mysterious powers of the fertilizing rain, and its extensions in running streams, lakes, and marshes. In common belief as in literature, the dark, wet side of nature showed itself alternately in women and in dragons. The great water deities of Chinese antiquity were therefore snake queens and dragon ladies.… Despite their natural affinity to women, dragons appear in many tales as fertilizing males and sometimes as powerful dragon kings. But these too were part of the rain cycle. The women …were the repositories of moisture—the cool, receptive loam, or the lake or marsh; the virile dragons were the active, falling rain. Both were manifestations of the infinite transmutations of the water principle.¹⁷

It was this female water principle which was at the heart of the combined solstice and water rites festival celebrated on the Fifth of the Fifth.

Who Drowned on the Fifth of the Fifth?

Ch'ü Yüan was not the only and probably not the first male figure to supplant the female drowning suicides and the goddesses of the southern water cults. In the oldest records, a number of drowning victims, most of them suicides, are associated with the Fifth of the Fifth, the day on which Ch'ü Yüan was supposed to have drowned himself.¹⁸ Before considering other features of the water rites, we should meet some of the most prominent of these figures.

The earliest example available is that of the shaman Ts'ao Hsu and his daughter Ts'ao 0 (or Ts'ao Yu). This is important for having both a male and female drowning victim associated with the Fifth of the Fifth, and for the suggestion that shaman practices are related to these. The main source tells us:

The filial daughter, Ts'ao O, was a native of Shang-yu in Kuei-chi [the Wu region, present day Chekiang). Her father, Ts'ao Hsu was a skilled musician and shaman. On the fifth day of the fifth month of the year Han-an [A.D. 143] he was drowned while rowing out towards the oncoming bore to meet the god with dancing in the Shang-yü river, and his body was never recovered.¹⁹

An elaboration of the story describes the daughter, a mere fourteen years old, searching into the darkest night for her father and then giving up and throwing herself into the river and drowning. The two corpses, inter-twined, apeared a few days later.²⁰ A cult and temples were later dedicated to Ts'ao 0, and these seem to have become centers for a cult of female deities or saints, all of whom sacrificed their lives.²¹ In recent centuries, at least one local tradition, from northwest Hupei, attributed the origins of the Tuan Wu water festival to the "loyal Ch'ü Yüan and the filial Ts'ao O."²²

The story of Ts'ao O and her father implicitly contains within it the next, and very important, figure in the history of the transmutation of the river goddesses. The god of the bore whom Ts'ao Hsü sought to meet was none other than Wu Tzu-hsu. We have seen him frequently paired with Ch'ü Yüan as an ill-fated minister. In Wang Ch'ung's compendious Lun Heng (first century A.D.) we read that Wu has already become a water god to be reckoned with:

It has been recorded that the king of Wu, Fu Ch'ai, put Wu Tzu-hsu to death, had him cooked in a cauldron, sewed into a leathern pouch, and thrown into the River. Wu Tzu-hsu, incensed, lashed up the waters, that they rose in great waves, and drowned people. At present [first century A.D.], temples for him have been erected on the Yangtze on Tan-t'u [near Chinkiang in Kiangsu] as well as on the Chekiang river of Ch'ien-t'ang [in Hangchow prefecture of Chekiang] for the purposes of appeasing his anger and stopping the wild waves.²³

There is further evidence from the fourth, sixth, and ninth centuries of temples devoted to Wu Tzu-hsu in the lower Yangtze Valley and even north into Shantung province.²⁴

It is very fortunate that the first record of Ch'ü Yüan's association with the rites is careful to point out that originally they were an Eastern Wu custom celebrated on behalf of Wu Tzu-hsü and were not related to Ch'U YUan.²⁵ Thus, by the first century A.D., WU Tzu-hsü had become a central figure in water-related sacrifices in the lower Yangtze Valley. By the third/fourth centuries, Ch'ü Yüan had begun to replace him in that role throughout the Yangtze Valley.²⁶

I want to cite a few more examples of minor figures associated with either the water cult and/or the Fifth of the Fifth to add some useful detail to our understanding of the rich customs which clustered entirely around Ch'ü Yüan by the sixth century. The figure of Fan Li (fifth century B.C.) illustrates the regional qualities of this lore. His biography in the Historical Records is intimately related to Wu Tzu-hsü's, for they were chief advisors of rival kings—Fan Li from Yueh and advisor of Kou Chien (fl. 496 B.C.), Wu Tzu-hsüi from Wu.²⁷ In addition to being a successful military strategist, Fan Li was something of a natural philosopher specializing in irrigation.²⁸ It seems that he (or his legend) moved north, into Ch'u and the heartland of the water cults around Lake Tung-t'ing and the Hsiang River, "where many natural features bore his name, and it was said that he dwelt in the midst of the lake, transformed from a semi-legendary philosopher of nature and advisor of kings into a kind of water deity."²⁹ A corollary to his story, preserved in a Ming text, has a touch of regional chauvinism. Here it was argued that Kou Chien, king of the Yuch state, and not Ch'ü Yüan, was truly the original figure whose death was memorialized by the Tuan Wu festival.³⁰

Chieh Tzu-t'ui (ca. seventh century B.C.) is another victim of the Fifth of the Fifth. According to the Chuang-tzu, "he was a model of fealty, going so far as to cut a piece of flesh from his thigh to feed his lord, Duke Wen [of Chin]. But later when the Duke [failed to reward him] he went off in a rage. [He withdrew to a forest and when the king tried to smoke him out] he wrapped his arms around a tree, and burned to death."³¹ According to later tradition, this was supposed to have occurred on Tuan Wu. The Ch'ing scholar Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682), whose opinion is always worthy of consideration, understood Chieh Tzu-t'ui to be a cognate of Wu Tzu-hsu and noted that the Five Elements system (alternation of the cosmic elements: water, wood, fire, metal, earth) may be at work here, structuring the legend and linking it systematically to Wu Tzu-hsii.³²

A final illustration is Chung K'uei, a multi-purpose fellow—star god, patron of literature, and exorcist of evil spirits—who is said to have committed suicide by drowning on Tuan Wu.³³ He seems to have originated in T'ang times. In the nineteenth century he was serving the people of Peking in a useful fashion on Tuan Wu. A book on calendar customs records that "every year at Tuan Yang [alternate name for Tuan Wu] shops have yellow streamers a foot long, covered with vermilion seal impressions, or perhaps painted with figures of the Heavenly Master or Chung K'uei, or with forms of the five poisonous creatures.… "³⁴ These streamers could be purchased to be posted on home portals to ward off evil influences.

Long-life Threads

The protective streamers may have a very ancient heritage that began in the Wu-Yüeh regions and made its appearance at the same time as Tuan Wu. The modern poet and mythologist Wen I-to explains the origins of what came to be known as long-life threads in terms of the special characteristics of the culture of Wu-Yueh.

Wen argued that a prominent feature of the area was the use of the dragon as a totem. In order to incorporate personally the qualities of their totem, these "dragon children," as they called themselves, cut their hair and tattooed their bodies so as "to look like dragons."³⁵ The body tattoos, especially those on the arms, evolved into customs such as binding the forearms with multi-colored silk threads.³⁶ Five was a common number of strands, and Wen argues that this number is of special significance to the Wu-Yueh culture. In particular, the number is persistently associated with the dragon. This in turn Wen adduces as external proof for his philologic demonstration that the name "Tuan Wu" (correct center) is an ancient lexicographical misrecording of the original "Tuan Wu" (correct five).³⁷ With the advent of the Five Elements systemization during the Han, he concludes, the associations of the number five, especially with the dragon, became fixed.

A second century A.D. encyclopedic work on popular customs already treats the use of long-life threads as a commonplace. However, its explanations are less complex than the modern scholar's: why, it asks, are multicolored silks bound to the forearm on the Fifth of the Fifth to ward off evil influences? "This is done because of Ch'u Yuan," is the simple answer.³⁸ As we shall see momentarily, these threads were used to bind the tsung-tzu rice dumplings thrown into water as a sacrifice to Ch'ü Yüan on Tuan Wu. However, there was at least one pre-Han water rite that used the threads in the same fashion but had nothing to do with Ch'ü Yüan: "Fresh plants, or colored ribbons in a bag or objects made of metal were let down into the river because the Chiao [malevolent] dragons were afraid of these things and in this way the sacrificial offering would be protected from being devoured by the dragon."³⁹

These explanations and illustrations of the threads are all quite consistent with each other and apposite with the main themes and motifs we have been laying out. However, if we go beyond these and ask what the threads have to do with "long life" and look to the shamanistic ritual which frequently accompanied the water rites, we shall have a fuller explanation that at least complements the sometimes tenuous arguments of Wen I-to. The modern folklorist Chao Wei-pang has made the astute observation that the threads are indeed related to the soul of the dead. To substantiate this, he cites some vivid evidence from the Miao tribespeople who formerly lived in southern Hunan.⁴⁰ Chao reminds us that part of the Dragon Boat Festival is the calling back of Ch'u Yuan's soul. This calling back is of course the job of the shaman, and in the Ch'u Tz'u poem "The Summons of the Soul" (Chaohun) we have a dramatization of the shaman conducting the ritual and using "silk cords."⁴¹ However, I believe Chao Wei-pang is incorrect when he suggests that these threads and cords are probably a symbol of the soul of the dead. Instead, M. Eliade's description of shamanistic ritual seems to provide the correct interpretation: "This [thread] is the 'road' along which the spirits will move," this cord is "the road by which the shaman will reach the realm of the spirits, the sky."⁴² Whatever the ultimate origin of these magical filaments, it seems most useful to think of them, in the context of the Tuan Wu rituals, as having the function of clearing away malevolent influences so that the soul (or its escort, the shaman) can make its necessary progress.

Tsung-tzu

By the same token, it is well to keep in mind that on Tuan Wu, when the tsung rice sacrifices were thrown into the water, they were intended to benefit the dead, not the dragons. Such sacrifices predated Ch'ü Yüan's putative death in the third century B.C., and came to be associated with him no later than the first century A.D.⁴³ A sixth-century text preserves the lore of Ch'ü Yüan's association with the tsung-tzu and the five-colored threads. It says that the people of Ch'u, upon the death of Ch'ü Yüan, and thereafter on every Fifth of the Fifth, made a sacrificial offering to his memory with rice put into bamboo tubes which they threw into the water. But then, in the first year of the Eastern Han (A.D. 25), a man from Changsha by the name of 0 Hui had a dream in which Ch'ü Yüan appeared to him and said: "I appreciate your yearly remembrance of me; but the rice you throw in the water is being grabbed away by the malevolent dragons (chiao-lung) who eat it all up. Please seal up the mouths of the tubes with melia leaves, and then bind around them five-colored silk threads, because the dragons are afraid of such things."⁴⁴ As with much of this lore, the dating seems oddly precise but it is in keeping with the date of Ch'ü Yüan's association with the custom of binding one's forearms with five-colored threads in order to ward off evil forces on Tuan Wu. Just how the tsung-tzu, bound with the magic threads, relates to the dead soul, and recalling the soul, is a question we shall take up after considering the Dragon Boat Festival.

The Dragon Boat Festival

No later than the sixth century A.D., the Yangtze Valley saw the complete melding of solstice and water rite customs around the figure of Ch'ü Yüan. By this time, the most dramatic element was incorporated, the Dragon Boat Festival (Lung-chou-chieh). For the reader unfamiliar with the essentials of the colorful and often fractious festival in its competitive aspect, this is a brief description by James Legge, translator of the Chinese classics. He is here recording his first encounter with the festival, around 1855, in the interior of Kwangtung province near the East River. These details substantially agree with those we have from over a thousand years earlier, as well as with the performance of the festival today. Legge saw:

Two boats, long and slender, each built to represent a dragon, the head of which rose high and formed the prow. A man sat upon it with a flag in each hand, which he waved to direct the movements of the crew, and with his face turned towards the helmsman who stood near the stern. Midway in the boats were two men beating with all their might, one a gong, the other a drum. The crew in each boat could not have been fewer than thirty men, each grasping a short stout paddle, and all with quivering eagerness and loud cries, racing towards a certain point.⁴⁵

The races, apparently of pre-Han origin in regions close to where Legge witnessed this spectacle, originally were associated neither with Tuan Wu nor Ch'ü Yüan.⁴⁶ They never seem to have been associated with Wu Tzu-hsii. The original function of the festival was "to sacrifice humans to the river in order to ensure fertility." The boat race was in effect a fight for survival, for the losing boat crew (originally there were perhaps only two boats with crews of fifty) would be toppled or beaten into the water and drowned, thus becoming the sacrificial victims.⁴⁷ The violence of the races was repeatedly attested to in the reports of local officials who tried unsuccessfully to proscribe them altogether.⁴⁸ Officialdom had become quite ambivalent toward the Ch'ü Yüan cult by the tenth century. On one hand, officials supported the construction of public temples to Ch'ü Yüan's memory and they participated in the Dragon Boat Festival. On the other, the mayhem of the competing dragon boat crews troubled their law-and-order mentality and eventually led them to try to control this aspect of the celebration. The great popularity of the racing events in many Dragon Boat Festivals made it very difficult for the officials to achieve this control.

Thanks to a Ming scholar, Yang Ssu-ch'ang (1588-1641), from the lake region northwest of Changsha, there is preserved and collated an invaluable body of data on the Dragon Boat Festival as it was understood and practiced in the modern Hunan-Hupei area going back to the sixth century.⁴⁹ For our purposes, the most important feature of this material is its description of the festival's relationship to Ch'ü Yüan. Fundamentally, the festival had great significance as a ritual to insure fertility and good health in the ensuing growing season; but by the sixth century it had come in some locales to be understood simultaneously as a memorial reenactment of the events surrounding Ch'ü Yüan's death.

The boats on the water were understood to be searching for Ch'ü Yüan's body. From the boats, tsung-tzu were thrown into the water (a prevalent tradition has it) in order to feed the malevolent dragon and thereby divert him and keep him from eating Ch'ü Yüan's corpse before the boat crew had an opportunity to retrieve it. In the meantime, Ch'ü Yüan's soul was called back (chao-hun) by way of the song, dance, and drumming by various members of the crew. It was common for a shaman or some kind of sorcerer to perform this ritual, either in the boat and/or from the shore. And, whether the participants addressed themselves to Ch'ü Yüan or not, it was common for the shaman or sorcerer to prognosticate about the future abundance of the harvest before the boats were actually launched.

Yang Ssu-ch'ang provides us with some of the early illustrations of the form of this tradition. Here he cites the sixth-century locus classicus of Ch'ü Yüan's association with the festival:

"We are going home no matter whether we have found him or not. Don't wait until the cold wind blows over the river." This sentence originated very far in the past. According to the Geographical Treatise of the Sui History, on the [5th] day of the 5th [moon], Ch'ü Yüan went to the Milo river. The natives pursued him to the Tung-t'ing Lake but in vain. The lake was vast, the boats small and no one could cross it. They all sang "How can we cross the lake?" Then on the way back they started racing to gather together at a pavilion. From that it comes that the people sing "We come back no matter whether we have found him or not."⁵⁰

Yang also brings to our attention the writings of Liu Yu-hsi (772-842), who for a decade performed his official duties in Yang Ssu-ch'ang's home town, Wuling (now Ch'ang-te), Hunan. Liu was fascinated by southern customs and he recorded observations such as his belief that the Dragon Boat Festival originated right there in Wu-ling. "Even nowadays," he notes, "the rowers, lifting up their oars and singing together are shouting: 'Who is here?' They are calling to Ch'ü Yüan."⁵¹ Liu provides evidence of Ch'ü Yüan's popularity when he notes that Wu-ling had a "Recalling Ch'ü Yüan Pavilion" (Chao Ch'ü T'ing) near which Liu at one time resided.

And there is even an earlier tradition, noted by Yang Ssu-ch'ang, that Wu-ling, in the vicinity of the pavilion, once had a street called "Ch'ü Yüan Lane," near which was a small river called the San Lü (that is, named after Ch'ü Yüan's formal official title: San Iü ta-fu). "Probably," Yang nostalgically concludes, "Ch'ü Yüan often walked there and enjoyed himself during his lifetime."⁵²

Finally, Yang brings us back to the problematic nature of the Dragon Boat Festival by citing a Sung dynasty (960-1127) source which chastises Ch'ü Yüan for his alleged predilection for boat racing. Because of this, "boat racing was made a custom of the people; some were wounded and drowned in fighting. And if it were not held for one year, plagues would be sent down." Yang Ssu-ch'ang notes that another Sung writer responded to this charge and defended Ch'ü Yüan, saying that "the boat race was not Ch'ü Yüan's idea."⁵³

It is a rather striking note the Sung writer makes when he suggests that a natural catastrophe would ensue were the Dragon Boat Festival not celebrated annually. Evidence supplied by such sources as Yang Ssu-ch'ang make it possible to conclude that, at least in the central Yangtze Valley, there has been an intimate relationship between the agricultural cycle and the lore of Ch'ü Yüan, Tuan Wu, and the Dragon Boat Festival. Göran Aijmer has convincingly demonstrated that what we see here, in the heart of the rice growing region, is "the ceremonialism of the transplantation of rice." Tuan Wu, that time when Ch'ü Yüan and the festival are of importance, is a critical time in the agricultural calendar and the ecology of this region—the summer solstice marks the time of rice transplanting and the hiatus in the agricultural work schedule just before the summer heat and rain which will make the rice plants grow. Here is Aijmer's summary description of the critical part of the cycle:

Rice [in Hunan-Hupei] is usually sown towards the end of April on special plots, and the young plants are moved to the large fields after thirty or forty days. During the period between sowing and planting, the farmers are busily engaged in preparing the soil and flooding the fields. The winter wheat is harvested at about this time. The transplanting of the rice plants, which is usually done around the end of May or the beginning of June, is a period of intense work. It is followed by a time with relatively little work in the rice fields, …weeding …and keeping water at the right level.⁵⁴ [Dragon Boat Festivals take place after this transplantation.]

Whatever its variations in ritual details or time of performance, the Dragon Boat Festivals all over south China have had the common denominator of an expression of hope for rain and a good harvest.⁵⁵ But in Hunan-Hupei in particular, Aijmer suggests, "the essential thing in the Ch'ü Yüan tradition …[is that] every year after the transplantation of rice, a drowned person's hun [soul] was called back."⁵⁶ In the agricultural context of the tradition, Ch'ü Yüan connoted rice. Thus, Aijmer writes, "young rice plants are transplanted in the large flooded fields under water, that is to say, they are 'drowned.' By this, the rice, probably considered collectively, was thought to have lost its hun. To me it seems feasible that it was the hun of the rice that was recalled in order to restore the growing strength of the uprooted and transplanted rice plants."⁵⁷

We can buttress Aijmer's perceptive conclusions with structurally similar ones from the customs of the Karen of Burma. Long ago, Frazer noted their ceremonial recalling of the rice soul.⁵⁸ More recently, and even more to the point, is Eliade's observation of the shaman's role in the ceremony. The shaman, who is instrumental in calling back the soul of a sick person, employs "a similar treatment for the 'sickness' of the rice, imploring its 'soul' to return to the crop."⁵⁹

I, too, would like to return for a moment to that useful collection of anecdotes about Ch'ü Yüan, the "Unofficial Biography of Ch'ü Yüan," for two more of its gems which reflect the themes of fecundity and rice. The first, which I have seen repeated nowhere else, says that after Ch'ü Yüan composed his poem "The Mountain Spirits" (Shan kuei), the spirits of the hills cried out and could be heard for miles; and this caused all the vegetation in the environs to decay and wither. The second story, which many texts repeat, accentuates the positive. We are told that in the Chiang ling Gazetteer there is mentioned a certain "Jade Rice Field." The field originated in this way. After Ch'ü Yüan was slandered and banished, he sadly returned home and plowed his fields. One day, while chanting the Li Sao, he learned on his plow and wept aloud to heaven. At that time, there was a great drought and famine in Ch'u, but in the very spot where his tear-drops had fallen there grew rice white as jade.⁶⁰

Clearly then, where the Ch'ü Yüan lore intersected Tuan Wu and Dragon Boat customs there was a central concern being expressed for a successful rice crop. In this context the tsung-tzu rice dumpling should be understood as a kind of ritual shorthand—a minor plot which contains within it all of the important themes. Like Ch'ü Yüan and the young rice sprouts, it too is "drowned," and it too requires protection of its soul with the multicolored threads which, accordingly, are wrapped around it. We should not ignore the fact that apparently from the beginning of Ch'ü Yüan's association with the Dragon Boat and tsung-tzu customs, the tsung-tzu were eaten by the celebrants as well as thrown into the water as an offering. If the identity of Ch'ü Yüan with rice—a rice god—is accepted, then the consumption of the tsung-tzu must appear to us as the familiar ritual incorporation of the god. However, the Chinese, true to their gustatory predilections, were quick to proliferate the varieties of tsung-tzu—stuffing them with delicacies other than rice (strawberries or turtle meat for example). The next step, naturally, was to consume them straightaway on Tuan Wu with no thought to wasting any of the tasty morsels by throwing them into the river.⁶¹ So much for ritual and symbol.

In sum, the conflation of solstice and water sacrifice customs around the figure of Ch'ü Yüan which occurred during the sixth century A.D. had special regional associations and a set of clearly recognizable functions. In general geographical terms, this is a southern phenomenon. Professor Wen Ch'ung-i's exhaustive reading in local gazetteers from all over China, and dating back to the sixteenth century, makes clear that once we leave the wet rice cultivating regions of China, this cluster of customs and demigods can no longer be found. Nor indeed is the most dramatic element, the Dragon Boat Festival, to be found in the north.⁶² One does find that Tuan Wu and the eating of tsung-tzu are customary in northern settings, like Peking, but they seem to have nothing to do with any of the water-associated customs and lore.

In studies of the local cultures of China, distinctions can be made within the South concerning the practices we have examined. While Ch'ü Yüan is celebrated along the full length of the Yangtze Valley, the epicenter of his cult, and perhaps the only area where the cluster as a whole was operative, was in present-day Hunan-Hupei. Thus, using the local studies of scholars like Eberhard and the eyewitness accounts of people like Yang Ssu-ch'ang, it is possible to conclude that Ch'ü Yüan appears in his rice-god mask only in this area of China where he was a principal in the ceremonialism of rice transplanting. Down river, Eberhard suggests, in the Wu region, there is no evidence of the Dragon Boat Festival serving that ceremonial function.⁶³ By no means is this to say, however, that Ch'ü Yüan was incapable of stirring up the devotion of the folks of Wu. In Anhwei Province, Hui Prefecture, for example, there was a Ch'ü Yüan temple (San Lü Tz'u) which housed an idol of him. It is said that on the Fifth of the Fifth the idol was carried aloft in a procession from the temple to the docks, where it was placed on a boat in preparation for the ritual search and recalling of his soul.⁶⁴

All in all, the development of the cluster of customs around Ch'ü Yüan gives evidence of the movement and interpenetration of the major southern local cultures. The recurrence of figures such as Wu Tzu-hsü, Fan Li, and Kou Chien along with Ch'ü Yüan dramatizes this. As for the functions of the combined solstice and water rites lore, they were so clearly recognized by Yang Ssu-ch'ang that modern scholars able to draw on wider evidence find little to add. Yang said that the customs surrounding the Dragon Boat Festival and Ch'ü Yüan were meant to avert natural calamity and to exorcise all manner of evils; they were also meant to provide means of foretelling and guaranteeing a productive harvest.⁶⁵

Conclusion: Chi'u Yuan in the Folk and Elite Traditions

To conclude this discussion and as a prologue to considerations of Ch'ü Yüan in the People's Republic, I want to speculate from a number of angles on how the folk and elite lore are related. I see them as complementary parts of a mythology that addresses itself rather comprehensively to basic concerns of human life, in the realms of polity and society, sacred and secular, cosmos and history. Approaches that rely on notions of "big and little traditions," "elite and folk," or "aristocratic and peoples" often suggest antagonism or mutual exclusiveness. In the Ch'ü Yüan lore we have an example apparently spanning these categories. We could simply dismiss this as an illusion, and argue that it is only the name of Ch'ü Yüan that links the two categories in which very different kinds of things are going on. But I ask that we defer that judgment while we consider a series of questions about the lore which I will discuss with some assumptions in mind. The first is that it is analytically more useful here to employ the categories of "written and oral traditions" and "cosmopolitan and regional cultures" than the other paired categories. The second assumption is a corollary. Perhaps the use of these latter categories will help us to see and remember that China's poet-officials who created and participated in the political and literary traditions of Ch'ü Yüan were also (and necessarily) participants in the oral traditions. By the same token, if we consider the "rites of summer" lore an important feature of Yangtze Valley regional culture, then there is no reason to doubt that some individuals who participated in the essentially literary, cosmopolitan culture also participated in it. In China, as in any other society, becoming literate, educated, and even literary did not necessarily mean abandoning religion, ritual, local custom, or regional culture.

The last assumption is that the relationship between any of these sets of categories will be understood differently depending on whether they are viewed as static entities or as part of a dynamic process. If we adopt the latter perspective, then we see not only that the content of the categories is often changing, but that the changes often result from cycling and recycling of the contents from one category to the other, from "big" to "little" tradition, if you will, and back again; from cosmopolitan to regional, and back again. In the instance of the Ch'ü Yüan lore, historical perspective reveals greater interdependence of these categories than might be evident from juxtapositions made without any sense of the preceding and subsequent developments.

These considerations enter into the first question I want to raise, if not answer, here. Why did Ch'ü Yüan in particular become associated when he did with the "rites of summer"? The modern Chinese explanation is the one that has prevailed since at least the sixth century, and I am treating it as part of the myth itself. This is the story that the association began immediately after the death of Ch'ü Yüan in the third century B.C., when the rites were initiated spontaneously by the common folk of Ch'u, specifically as a memorial to him. The special modern addition to this story is that Ch'ü Yüan endeared himself to the folk with his patriotic fervor, and hence earned this memorialization, when he wandered among them during his banishment.

The extant evidence, however, suggests that all aspects of the summer rites predated Ch'ü Yüan's association with them and were in some cases originally associated with other figures. Actually, the evidence first associates him with an element of the summer rites only in the first century A.D., three centuries after the surmised date of his death. Thus it must be concluded that Ch'ü Yüan did not become part of the summer rites, and perhaps was completely unknown by the common public, until after he gained his preeminent position within Han literature. And further, it seems certain that the figure of Ch'ü Yüan only became part of the summer rites and known to the general populace of the Yangtze Valley through the determined efforts of the educated elite.

Now the questions are changed. Why did officials and notables introduce their Ch'ü Yüan into the general culture of the Yangtze Valley? How did they do it? And finally, why did they do it when they did? Let us take the question of timing first. The literature we have reviewed consistently shows the formation of the Ch'ü Yüan folk cult over the centuries, starting with the disintegration of the Han polity, and ending with the initial stages of political reunification in the sixth century. This span of time is marked by the collapse of the Han, the first of the great waves of nomadic invasions of north China, the sacking of the capital, and the fragmentation of the polity into a series of northern and southern dynasties. All this has resonance with the story of Ch'ü Yüan in Han literature; but I am venturing that the events most relevant to our questions are the migrations of populations south, to the refuge of the Yangtze, in the wake of the invasions. There the emigrants set up colonial regimes, microcosms of northern cosmopolitan society. Periodically they revealed their obsession to return north by their costly attempts to reconquer it and reunite the country.

Because of his prominence in the Han literary tradition, Ch'ü Yüan was surely well known to these settlers in the South who devoted themselves to perpetuating Han literary culture. How much more meaningful and immediate to them must have been his experience, now that they themselves, or their parents before them, had witnessed the destruction of their state and had been forced into exile in the South.

Conquering or colonizing peoples, like these 6migr6s to the South, quite regularly bring with them their gods and heroes and establish them, if they can, alongside or in place of indigenous ones. The fact that Ch'ü Yüan was a Southerner may have made it seem even more reasonable to these émigrés that they should put him in the place of the various local cult figures. That effort also entailed the substitution of Wu Tzu-hsü by Ch'ü Yüan. The former figure seems to have initiated the process of replacing local goddesses and saints with male political figures who were prominent within the northern literary tradition. The process of supplanting indigenous cult figures has the appearance of an effort by the Northerners to use southern "native sons" as a medium for conveying the civilized political values of the North. The rivalry between the figures of Ch'ü Yüan and Wu Tzu-hsü may reveal the social complexity of the southern migrations. Perhaps it reflects tension and rivalry between the older northern Chinese settlers in the Yangtze Valley and the émigrés of the fourth century and later.

Let me summarize my speculations. First, officials and/or local notables were necessary for establishing the southern popular cult because only they could command the resources necessary to build and maintain temples, shrines, and dragon boats; and only through them could a figure like Ch'ü Yüan come to prominence in the oral tradition. Only they could have provided the impetus and the coordination that resulted in the substitution of a melange of cults and customs by a regularized calendar festival whose parts were linked together with a single, pedigreed figure. Secondly, the fact that Ch'ü Yüan should be the single figure must be a function not only of his southernness (Wu Tzu-hsü was a prominent Southerner too), but of his name being associated with a corpus of poetry, and concomitantly, the unmatched adulation which he received in Han letters.

The central role which the classes played in bringing Ch'ü Yüan to the masses during this formative period should not be taken as a confirmation of the modern Chinese claim that the lore of Ch'ü Yüan was created merely as a medium for the "aristocracy" (that is, the ruling class) to broadcast a notion of compliance to authority, and as a device for obtaining popular respect for bureaucrats. Given the personal political and social situations of the émigrés we have been discussing, I believe that they were motivated by a desire to use Ch'ü Yüan to represent their own political despair and their undying loyalty to a lost homeland. Moreover, the evidence we have about the practice of the Ch'ü Yüan cult, especially the Fifth of the Fifth, suggests that the story of Ch'ü Yüan's political life and the details of his loyalty were at best superficially conveyed to the general public, and were all but absent from the most important rituals.

Taking the long view, from the earliest elements of the Ch'ü Yüan lore down to the formation of the popular cult, what we see is a cycling of symbols, motifs, and attitudes between the oral and regional and the literary and cosmopolitan sectors of Chinese culture. Schematically, we begin with the oral traditions of Ch'u culture (shaman lore, water deities, water sacrifices) drawn into literature like the Li Sao. Here they were used to convey ideas and sentiments that found appreciative audiences within Han official culture. Only within the latter cosmopolitan, literary tradition does the figure of Ch'ü Yüan emerge. And once having achieved prominence there, he is then introduced into the regional, oral traditions where the cycle first began.

Related to this cycling process is the structural kinship between the content of the literary and oral traditions of Ch'ü Yüan. The Han literary lore and the oral tradition of Ch'ü Yüan appear to have congruence and overlap because the former develops its political themes with a sense of cosmic order and time, the alternation and balance of cosmic forces, and the relationship of these to human powers, productivity, and mortality. Not only does the oral tradition share these grand themes, it also employs similar motifs and symbols, which revolve around the complementary primal forces and a concern over the danger of their potential or actual imbalance.

The sacrifice motif is also prominent throughout both traditions. And in both, I believe that the result of the sacrifice is understood to be a renewal of life and fecundity. Just as future health and an abundant crop are the expected results of the Tuan Wu and Dragon Boat sacrifices, so literature (Ch'ü Yüan's poetry, Ssu-ma Ch'ien's history) is the product of the officials' ordeal and sacrifice, the ultimate source of their potency and immortality.

A final illustration of the resonance between the Han literary tradition and the summer rites is in the use of shaman lore to achieve this renewal of productive life. Where the shaman journey might empower the poet-official, the shaman's summons and guidance of the soul is the means for periodic regeneration. Shaman lore provides a way to cross sacred, hence dangerous, boundaries. It is a device to mediate between complementary forces at critical times of transition or imbalance: between light and darkness, water and fire, life and death, minister and king. Thus, the linkages between the Han literature of the loyal official and the summer rites are made both at the level of a concern with cosmic forces and at the level of ritual, which is meant to comprehend and control those forces.

By the time we come to the treatment of Ch'ü Yüan in the exile poetry of the eighth century, most of these grand themes and dramatic motifs are missing. Cosmic orientations, shaman motifs, and sexual symbols do not inform the literary tradition about Ch'ü Yüan from this point on. Though the theme of sacrifice and ordeal persist in the exile poetry, they are quite refined and sedate vestiges of the raw and earthy lore of the Han. However—and this is my point—despite the narrowing of the scope of Ch'ü Yüan literary tradition after the Han, the power and appeal of the myth as a whole remained intact and was broadened. This is so because the main structures of the Han lore were displaced into the oral tradition, which I see as a strong complement to the literary tradition, and continued down to modern times.

In the twentieth century, we see for the first time that the lore of Ch'ü Yüan itself begins to encompass the question of the relations between the oral and literary traditions. In spite of insistence on the fundamental categories of "people's" and "aristocratic," the tradition of Ch'ü Yüan is considered to be wholly within the former. It is perceived as a single unit with no distinctions, invidious or otherwise, between an oral, folk, or regional Ch'ü Yüan lore, and a literary, elite, and cosmopolitan one. The basic reason for this perception is the modern insistence on finding in the lore important sources for the transformative power of Chinese history. It is valued as a classic instance of that power, which can be taken as a model for modern times.

In the twentieth century, we seem to be witnessing another cycle of interaction between literary and oral traditions. The former has co-opted the latter and informed it, explicitly, with new meanings. The newly evolved lore of Ch'ü Yüan is concerned not with cosmos but with history; not with alternating and complementary seasons and elemental cosmic forces, but with progressive, linear history propelled forward by the clash of antagonistic human forces. No longer is the problem one of crossing sacred boundaries, but rather of crossing the secular boundaries that divide historical epochs and social classes.

Notes

Abbreviations

CTSM

Ch'u Tz'u shu-mu wu-chung, Chiang Liang-fu.

CTYCL

Ch'u Tz'u yen-chiu lun-wen chi.

HSWC

Han shih wai chuan, James R. Hightower, trans.

W:RGH

Records of the Grand Historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien.

A prefatory word on sources: two publications have been of special help with this study. The first, Chiang Liang-fu's Ch'u Tz'u shu-mu wu-chung (1961), is basically a critical bibliography of all aspects of Ch'u Tz'u and Ch'ü Yüan studies. Of particular value are the short critical essays which Chiang has reprinted in the volume. In this fashion, he makes many obscure materials easily available, and with them he also provides a panoramic view of attitudes toward Ch'ü Yüan and criticism of the Ch'u Tz'u from antiquity to the twentieth century. The second publication is the three volume Ch'u Tz'u yen-chiu lun-wen chi (1957-1970). In its eight hundred pages it reprints, in full, seventy essays published in the People's Republic of China in a broad range of periodicals between 1951 and 1963. This provides a thorough sampling of changing and conflicting attitudes about Ch'U Yuan and about all aspects of Ch'u Tz'u poetry. In my notes, I cite these two publications respectively rather than the specific works which are reprinted in them.

¹ This festival is known by a number of names. Tuan wu is the most common. This may be translated as "correct" or "exact middle," reflecting its occurrence at the mid-point of the solar calendar, the summer solstice, which most often takes place in the fifth lunar month. Göran Aijmer concludes "the Correct Middle was probably regarded as the middle of the solar year placed in the lunar calendar, i.e. the day of the solstice projected on the lunar calendar." See The Dragon Boat Festival on the Hupeh Hunan Plain, Central China: A Study in the Ceremonialism of the Transplantation of Rice, pp. 26-27. Another name for the festival is Tuan yang, "sun's extremity." The Five Elements cosmology perhaps plays a role in a third designation, T'ien chung, "middle of the heavens." In the Five Elements system, the number five is associated with the center, as opposed to the four points of the compass.

² See Lu K'an-ju, "Wu yüeh wu jih" [The fifth of the fifth], pp. 73-75; Yu Kuo-en, Ch'u Tz'u kai-lun [Summary of Ch'u Tz'u], p. 106.

³ Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China, p. 161.

⁴ Ibid., p. 153; Wang Ch'ung, Lun Heng, 1:161. Also see C. S. Wong, A Cycle of Chinese Festivals, pp. 125-127.

⁵ For a general discussion of the many customs associated with this day, see Ou-yang Fei-yün, "Tuan wu o-jih k'ao" [Study of Tuan Wu as an evil day]; Derk Bodde, Festivals in Classical China: New Year and Other Annual Observances During the Han Dynasty, chapter 13. The most comprehensive study is Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih [History of the Tuan Wu festival].

⁶ Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 157.

⁷ Ibid., p. 159. Cp. Bodde, Festivals in Classical China, pp. 299-301. See another translation of this passage in Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276, pp. 193-194. The source cited by Gernet is a thirteenth-century description of the city of Hangchow. This source also describes the day of Tuan Wu as a bad one for taking the civil service examination.

⁸ The Ch'ü Yüan wai chuan is reprinted in Chiang Chi, Shan tai ko chu Ch'u Tz'u. It is reprinted and punctuated in LU Tien-ming, Ch'ü Yüan, Li Sao chin i [Modern commentary on Li Sao], pp. 66-67, where it is called Ch 'ii Yuan pieh chuan. Parts of Ch'ü Yuan wai chuan are cited and glossed in Chan An-t'ai, Ch'ü Yüan, pp. 3-4. Some of the anecdotes in the Ch'ü Yüan wai chuan seem to be derived from the Shih i chi (Forgotten tales), attributed to Wang Chia of the Tsin period (265-420). It was edited by Hsiao Ch'i of the Liang period (520-557). The epigraph to my chapter four is taken from book four of the Shih i chi and was translated in Lu Hsuin, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), pp. 69-70.

⁹ Arthur Waley, The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China, p. 49. This passage collates materials respectively from the Shih chi, 126. 14a; Shui ching chu, 10; and Shih chi, 15.10b. Cp. Sir James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, p. 430: "[Egyptian] tradition runs that the old custom was to deck a young virgin in gay apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice to obtain a plentiful inundation. Whether that was so or not, the intention of the practice appears to have been to marry the river, conceived as a male power, to his bride the cornland, which was so soon to be fertilised by his water." Frazer notes that in his day a straw doll surrogate was used, or money was thrown into the canal on such occasions.

¹⁰ Eberhard, Local Cultures, pp. 37-38.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 38. Also see CTYCL, 1:30-33, for discussion of the Nine Songs, the drowned river goddess Erh Fei, and her relationship to the sage-king and river god Shun.

¹² Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 393.

¹³ Edward Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature, pp. 46, 116.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 6.

¹⁵ See summary of dragon symbolism and dragon's relationship to rain and water in Henri Maspero, "The Mythology of Modern China," pp. 276-277.

¹⁶ See Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih, p. 131. This is one example of a Kwangtung custom associated with Ch'ü Yüan: the dragon king's temple is visited; incense is burned to the dragon and he is draped in red banners. This dragon apparently is not considered malevolent.

¹⁷ Schafer, Divine Woman, pp. 28-29.

¹⁸ Lu K'an-ju collated materials on this subject at an early date in Ch'ü Yüan yü Sung Yü. Also see Ou-yang Fei-yun, "Tuan wu o-jih k'ao."

¹⁹ Translated in Hawkes, "Quest of the Goddess," pp. 46-47. Hawkes cites Pan Ku, Hou Han shu [History of the Latter Han], chapter 84 (Lieh nu chuan). I use this translation rather than Arthur Waley's, with which Hawkes takes issue. See Waley, The Nine Songs, p. 31. Also see discussion of this passage in Chan Pingleung, "Ch'u Tz'u and Shamanism in Ancient China," p. 132. Cf. Hayashi Minao's comments on the term "shen wu" (divine shaman), which appears in Wang I's commentary on the Li Sao. Wang I wrote that "Wu Hsien in ancient times was a divine shaman." Hayashi cites a passage from a later text to illuminate the obscure term: "In the eastern [i.e. lower] stretches of the Yangtze, the place called Wu-tsang is the abode of the descendents of the divine shaman Wu Tu of Yueh. When he died, Kou-chien had him buried in the centre of the river—the shamans and the gods wanted to take advantage of this to overturn the boats of the Wu people." Hayashi Minao, "The Twelve Gods of the Chan-kuo Period Silk Manuscript Excavated at Ch'ang-sha," p. 135.I discuss Kouchien in chapter four below.

²⁰ Cited in Hsu Chung-yu, "Tuan wu min-su k'ao" [Study of Tuan Wu folklore], p. 34. Part of this same story is found in Herbert Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary, 2:759.

²¹ Eberhard, Local Cultures, pp. 38, 393.

²² Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih, p. 122.

²³ Wang Ch'ung, Lun Heng, 2:247-251.

²⁴ Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 391.

²⁵ See note 2 above. Also see Arthur Waley's translation of the folktale "Wu Tzu-hsü," in Ballads and Stories from Tunhuang, pp. 25-52. The tale is full of motifs from the river goddess lore and the post-Han lore of Ch'ü Yüan.

²⁶ The two continue to be confused with each other and with other figures. For example, Wolfram Eberhard reports that "in Tainan [Taiwan] there is a temple for a Shui-hsien tsun-wang (water-saint honored king) which has been a cult center for merchants, sailors, and fishermen since 1715. Nobody there knows who he is although some say the name refers to three dieties: Yu, Wu Tzu-hsü and San-lü ta-fu [Ch'ü Yüan]. Others add to these Wang Po and Li Po." Other sources associate other names with the saint, but Wu Tzu-hsü and Ch'ü Yüan appear most frequently. See Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 402. Cornelius Osgood's study of Hong Kong shows that the Dragon Boat Festival is very popular, but his informants either do not know who is being celebrated or offer suggestions such as this: the commemoration is for "a Sung dynasty minister of court who drowned himself in a river in protest against abuses which were being perpetrated on the people." Cornelius Osgood, The Chinese: A Study of a Hong Kong Community, p. 910.

²⁷W:RGH, 1:226, 2:479, 481. HSWC, p. 336. Also see Wen Ch'ung-i "Chiu ko chung te shui-shen yü Huanan te lung-chou sai-shen" [English subtitle: Water Gods and Dragon Boats in South China], p. 73ff.

²⁸ Wang Ch'ung, Lun Heng, 2:327.

²⁹ Schafer, Divine Woman, p. 58.

³⁰ Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih, pp. 110-112. This draws upon Yang Ssu-ch'ang. Wu-ling ching-tu lüeh. a basic reference for the festival. See chapter four and notes below.

³¹ Watson. Chuang Tzu, p. 329.

³² Ku Yen-wu, Jih chih lu, ts'e 4, pp. 83-84. Also see Lu K'an-ju, "Wu yüeh wu jih," and Ou-yang Fei-yun, "Tuan wu o-jih k'ao."

³³ Chien T'ang, "Tuan wu k'ao" [Study of Tuan Wu]; E. T. C. Werner, Myths and Legends of China, pp. 106, 248-250; Tz'u Hai [dictionary], s.v. "Chung K'uei," p. 1389; Morohashi Tetsuji, Dai kan-wa jiten [Chinese encyclopedic dictionary], s.v. "Chung K'uei," 2:601; Lu Hsün, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, pp. 288, 379; M. L. C. Bogan, Manchu Customs and Superstitions, p. 33.

³⁴ Tun Li-ch'en, Annual Customs and Festivals in Peking as Recorded in the Yen-ching sui-shih-chi, p. 44.

³⁵ Wen I-to, "Tuan wu k'ao" [A study of Tuan Wu], Wen i-to ch'uan-chi, 1:221-228.

³⁶ Wen I-to, "Tuan chieh te li-shih chiao-yü" [Historical lessons of Tuan Wu], in Wen 1-to ch'uan-chi, 1:239-242.

³⁷ Wen I-to, Wen i-to ch'uan-chi, pp. 228-231.

³⁸ Bodde, Festivals in Classical China, p. 315.

³⁹ Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 34.

⁴⁰ Chao Wei-pang, trans. and ed., "The Dragon Boat Race in Wuling, Hunan—by Yang Ssu-ch'ang," p. 10. Chao cites this evidence: "When a Hei-miao has died, a coloured thread is tied up on the top of a bamboo stick which is erected in front of the tomb; men and women made offerings to it. When a Kuo-ch'uan Ch'i-lao is sick, a five-coloured thread is bound up on a tiger's bone, which is put in a winnowing fan, and a sorcerer is invited to pray for him."

⁴¹ See Hawkes, Ch'u Tz'u, "Chao Hun," p. 105:

The priests are there who call you, walking
backwards to lead you in.
Ch'in basket-work, silk cords of Ch'i, and
silken banners of Cheng:
All things are there proper for your recall;
and with long-drawn, piercing cries they
summon the wandering soul.

⁴² Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, pp. 111, 117. On these pages Eliade is specifically discussing the rituals of the Manchurian shamans.

⁴³ Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 197.

⁴⁴ See Wu Chün, Hsü ch'i chieh-chi. This sixth-century text is cited and discussed in Yu Kuo-en, "Wei-ta shih-jen Ch'ü Yüan chi ch'i wen-hsüeh" [Great poet Ch'ü Yüan and his writings], Kung-jen jih-pao [Daily worker] (13 June 1953), reprinted in Yu Kuo-en, Ch'u Tz'u lun wen chi [Anthology of writings on Ch'u Tz'u], pp. 273-274. Also see Chan An-t'ai, Ch'ü Yüan, p. 4, and Chao Wei-pang, "The Dragon Boat Race in Wu-ling," p. 11. Cf. Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih, p. 21, for variant of this tale.

⁴⁵ James Legge, "The Li Sao Poem and Its Author," p. 79. Cf. Rev. Justus Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, 2:56.

⁴⁶ Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 395. There is strong concensus by scholars on this. It is the conclusion, for example, of the contemporary research of Yu Kuo-en and Lu K'an-ju. It was also the opinion of Yang Ssu-ch'ang, in the Ming dynasty.

⁴⁷ Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 396.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Yang Ssu-ch'ang was a native of Wu-ling, Hunan (present-day Ch'ang-te, just northwest of Changsha). He received his chin shih degree in 1610 and was president of the Ministry of War in 1637. See C. Goodrich and C. Y. Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 2:1538-1542. Yang is the reputed author of the invaluable Wu-ling ching-tu lüeh (Dragon Boat Races in Wu-ling), the main source for this subject. It describes in great detail the contemporary festival and collates data going back to the sixth century. The entire text is translated in Chao Wei-pang, "The Dragon Boat Race in Wu-ling." The text is analyzed in detail in Aijmer, Dragon Boat Festival.

⁵⁰ Translated in Chao Wei-pang, "The Dragon Boat Race in Wu-ling," pp. 7-8.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 5.

⁵² Ibid., p. 8.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 9. For the Dragon Boat Festival celebrations in the Sung dynasty, see Chang Ch'i-yiun, "Nan Sung tu-ch'eng Hang-chou" [Hang-chow, the Southern Sung capital], p. 88.

⁵⁴ Aijmer, Dragon Boat Festival, pp. 24-25. 73-77.

⁵⁵ For example, see Wen Ch'ung-i, "Chiu ko chung te shui-shen," pp. 73-77.

⁵⁶ Aijmer, Dragon Boat Festival, p. 104. Also see Carl W. Bishop, "Long Houses and Dragon Boats," p. 417. Bishop compares searching for Ch'u Yuan's body and recalling his soul to the ancient Egyptian ritual search for the drowned corpse of Osiris as described by Plutarch. Bishop concludes that the Dragon Boat Festival "appears to be [a rite] of rainmaking in connection with agriculture, and it is pretty certainly of pre-Chinese origin. Not improbably it once centered about a human sacrifice by drowning, and embodied the very widespread notion of a 'dying god' and the return of the growing season."

⁵⁷ Aijmer, Dragon Boat Festival, pp. 105, 113.

⁵⁸ Frazer, Golden Bough, pp. 481-488.

⁵⁹ Eliade, Shamanism, p. 442.

⁶⁰ Cited in Lu T'ien-ming, Ch'ü Yüan, Li Sao chin i, p. 66. Cp. vernacular transcription of text in Chan An-t'ai, Ch'ü Yüan, pp. 3-4.

⁶¹ Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih, passim, and Eberhard, Local Cultures, p. 197.

⁶² Wen Ch'ung-i, "Chiu ko chung te shui-shen," pp. 94-104.

⁶³ Eberhard says "Aijmer (in his The Dragon Boat Festival) studied the aspect of the festival which is called 'ching tu' (wading through, in competition). He has defined this festival as a festival of rice planting, and I think he is correct. I doubt, however, that the dragon boat race is a 'crossing' of a water course. A boat festival does not make much sense in a rice planting ceremony. His 'Study of the Ceremonialism in the Transplantation of Rice' as he calls the book, refers to customs in Hunan and Hupei. The boat race, however, seems to be connected with the lower Yangtze area, Anhui, Kiangsu, Kiangsi, Chekiang, Fukien and the Yueh area, where rice transplantation does not seem to be a part of the festival" (Local Cultures, p. 405).

⁶⁴ Huang Shih, Tuan wu li su shih, p. 132. Unfortunately, Huang Shih gives no dates for this custom—a typical flaw with his book, and a characteristic problem with data gathered on Tuan Wu by other Chinese scholars.

⁶⁵ For Yang Ssu-ch'ang's conclusions, see Chao Wei-pang, "The Dragon Boat Festival in Wu-ling," pp. 8-9, 11-12; and Wen Ch'ung-i, "Chiu ko chung te shui-shen," pp. 73-77.