一条江，一个诗人，两千年：端午节为什么是中国人最深的乡愁

Today,

we'll talk about

a festival almost every Chinese person

has celebrated since childhood,

yet may never truly have understood — the Dragon Boat Festival.

Every year, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month,

the scent of zongzi leaves drifts in the air,

and dragon boats race across the water.

For us today,

Duanwu

is perhaps just a three-day holiday,

a seasonal meal of zongzi.

But if you are willing

to walk a few steps deeper

into this festival,

you will find

that at its very end

stands a man,

and a river

that has flowed for over two thousand years.

This man

is called Qu Yuan.

To explain him clearly,

we must first go back

more than two thousand three hundred years.

China then

was not yet unified,

dotted with rival lords,

war raging year after year.

Qu Yuan

was a noble and minister of the southern state of Chu,

and, in Chinese history,

the first

great poet

to leave behind his name.

His poem 'Li Sao',

to this day,

is still, by countless people,

recited again and again.

And yet,

more moving than his talent

was his integrity.

All his life, Qu Yuan

was loyal to one thing only —

his homeland, Chu.

He longed for Chu to be strong,

longed for it to be able

to withstand the northern power

that watched it like a hungry tiger — the state of Qin.

Again and again he offered counsel,

and again and again

was squeezed out and framed by the petty men around him,

until, at last,

he was, time after time,

exiled to remote places.

He could only, from afar,

watch helplessly

as the country he loved so deeply

slid, step by step, into decline.

In 278 BC,

the scene he least wished to see

came to pass after all:

Chu's capital

fell to Qin.

His country broken,

his home destroyed.

For Qu Yuan,

the last light

in his life

went out.

On that fifth of the fifth month,

he came to the bank of the Miluo River,

embraced a great stone,

and leapt,

giving himself,

forever,

to that river.

Legend says

the people along the river,

hearing the dreadful news,

were overcome with grief.

They vied to row out,

onto the river to search for him —

and this

is the origin of dragon-boat racing.

They cast rice balls

into the river,

only so the fish and shrimp

would not harm

the poet's body —

and this

is the origin of zongzi.

Of course,

as a festival of long history,

Duanwu's meaning

is far more than one man's story.

Before Qu Yuan,

the ancients already saw the fifth lunar month

as an 'evil month', a 'poison month'.

At this time the summer heat rises,

snakes and insects breed,

and plagues easily spread.

And so,

the mugwort and calamus hung at the door,

the scented sachets worn on the body,

the five-color threads tied on children's wrists —

all carry

the ancients' simple wish

to ward off evil and illness and pray for peace and health —

a humble wish.

And so,

the heartfelt remembrance of a patriotic poet,

and a people's

ancient wisdom of seeking fortune and avoiding harm,

over long ages,

merged and settled,

and finally crystallized into

the Duanwu we know today.

Speaking of this,

I want, with you,

to talk about a deeper layer.

Don't you find

this an almost unbelievable thing?

A man

has been gone

for over two thousand three hundred years.

And yet,

to this day,

every fifth of the fifth month,

from cities to villages,

from home to overseas,

hundreds of millions of Chinese

will still, because of him,

eat the same food,

and row the same kind of boat.

What we commemorate —

is it really only Qu Yuan,

this one particular man?

Perhaps

what we truly cannot let go of

is, in him,

that 'though I die nine times, I would not regret it' resolve,

that

devotion that binds

the self and the homeland

tightly together —

that deep feeling.

It is a kind

of spiritual ground-color carved

into the deepest part of our culture.

At the end of the show,

I want to leave you

with two questions.

First,

this year's Duanwu —

how did you spend it?

While eating zongzi and watching the dragon boats,

did you,

even for a single moment,

think of Qu Yuan?

Second,

for over two thousand years,

we have used a festival

to remember one man.

So,

how do you hope

the people of the future

will,

remember us,

and the things

we hold dear?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they

are worth your

thinking about slowly.