Chinese Space Enterprises Celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival
Celebrations and a public holiday are occurring across China.
On May 31st, China is celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival (端午节), also known as the Midyear Festival, with a public holiday running from May 30th to June 1st. During the holidays, families travel to reunite, race dragon boats, and eat zongzi (粽子), sticky rice dumplings wrapped in leaves. People also hang fragrant herbs on their doors, wear scented sachets for good luck.
The popular legend around the festival is the suicide of Qu Yuan (屈原), poet and politician, in the Miluo River (汨罗江) following his exile from and the fall of the State of Chu’s (楚) capital during the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE). While Qu Yuan was committing suicide, the legend says that those nearby raced down the river on boats attempting to save him. The inception of zongzi was either an attempt to prevent fish from eating his body or as offerings to his spirit, with the leaf wrapping keeping the rice from a water dragon.
Today, Qu Yuan has had some influence on the space program via his poem Heavenly Questions (天问). The poem’s content contained questions to heaven from the author, and its name is made up of the characters 天 (Tiān), meaning sky or heavens, and 问 (Wèn), meaning to ask or inquire. In the space program, the poem’s title has been used to name the Planetary Exploration of China program’s probes, so far Tianwen-1 and Tianwen-2.
To celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival, the various space companies and agencies of China shared posters online in celebration. Like with the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节), the New Year, 75th National Day (国庆节), the Spring Festival (春节), and May Day, almost all of these posters were solely shared on Chinese social media platforms, such as Weibo and WeChat. Due to this, I’ve compiled them all here with links back to the original posts, or where they were found. (If you have found one that I didn’t include please do reach out).
CAS Space
LandSpace
iSpace
Deep Blue Aerospace
Cosmoleap
Galactic Energy
China Academy of Space Technology
Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology
Deep Space Exploration Laboratory
Space Epoch
Genesat
MinoSpace
OrienSpace
Space Pioneer
Geespace
Space Circling
Astronstone
Yunyao Aerospace
AZSpace
