"DRAGON BOAT" RACES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 224, 21 September 1929, Page 9 (Supplement)

"DRAGON BOAT" RACES.

ANCIENT CHINESE WATER FESTIVAL. OLDEST CRATTIN THE WORLD SPORT AND RITUAL COMBINED. Europe and America have their boat races. But from what may be seen by a traveller of the annual Chinese rowing fiesta, surely these comparatively modern water "classes" can teach nothing to the far more ancient Eastern one, the dragon boat races. No water races were ever more vociferously applauded, and none, it is very probable, have an element of the semi-religious in thezn such as have these contests. The event is a South China institution as important as the Olympiad. And in China classicism of any sort reaches so far back that origins melt into fables. These boat races held in ancient honour of a once prepotent dragon king undoubtedly mean more, both as sport and as ritual than foreign observers realise.

Wliat is the dragon boat? The very oddest craft left in the "world to-dav. It is about three feet wide in the middle' and from forty-five to seventy-five feet long, and carries a crew of forty or fifty paddlers. Tho prow rises fiercely into the head of a glittering dragon, the stern represents its uplifted tail. Elaborately made, these boats, for tliey arc heir-

looms, dedicated to tlie master dragon of the community, are trained in by selected athletes weeks before the great event. The occupants kneel alternately as right arid left paddlers the "coxswain," standing amidships, performing in the strangest manner whereby coxswain ever handled a crew. In each hand he holds a heavy-ended baton, beating with first one hand then the other upon a tall, broad drum over which he leans. These beats give his paddlers the rhvthm of their strokes. He thus has perfect control over the pace he wishes to make, In the stern, watchful and silent, crouches a steersman with a shorter paddlo than the rest.' All the evening preceding Festival Day the air is athrob with, practising crews. Throngs gather along the banks by sunrise; soon every vantage point is crowded, even the watercourse is as iammed with traffic as it could possibly be and permit of racing at all. Contfnuous babbie arises from every side. At least a score of dragon boats are tuning up; the air is being unmercifully pounded bv drumbeats from all points if the compass. Perhaps a dozen preliminary, or qualifying, heats are to be run oil' by noon. . . A long wait. L'rowds getting more tense, more noise, more firecrackers, more boats. . . At last a revolver cracks. Pandemonium! file oars of live boats catch the water Aitli a splash; the narrow boats jump 'orward, looking quite like a covey of startled centipedes scurrying to cover. The crafts rock from side to side; now jne goggled-eyed, white-fanged, redongned prow creeps ahead, now another. Uho honour of a village is at stake. - . \t last a winner! One heat is done. But the excitement goes on for eight lours more, till at last the dragon boat estival is done.