Poetic China: An excerpt from the epic “Crossing the River”

Ancient Chinese believed the sun was exactly in the middle of the sky at noon on this day, which therefore marked the summer solstice in China. It also originated as a day of commemoration for a patriotic poet, Qu Yuan (340-278 BC). Qu had great strategies to keep Chu strong. However, other officials were jealous of him, spread rumors about him, and eventually persuaded the king to banish him. Qu spent the next 20 years in exile until the Qin Kingdom conquered his beloved Chu Kingdom. Then he drowned himself in the Miluo, a tributary of the Yangtze River, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month that year. Many sympathizers took their boats out in an attempt to save him. When they finally gave up searching, they decided to wrap rice with reed or bamboo leaves and throw the little packs into the Miluo in hope that the fish would eat the rice rather than Qu’s body.

The rice-dish making and the boat rowing gradually evolved into nationwide holiday customs, which later spread throughout East Asia as well as Southeast Asia, and eventually followed Chinese, Korean, Singaporean and Vietnamese immigrants to the West.

Qu can be regarded as Homer of the East. He created a genre of Chinese literature that is similar to the Greek epic, also full of myths and legends. The genre is called chu tsi (楚辞) in Chinese. The phonetic translation “tsi” is the closest spelling to the original sound, though the word would be spelled as “ci” based on the official Chinese phonetic system, pinyin (拼音). An excerpt from one of Qu’s epics is presented with English translation in this chapter.

Copyright: A POETIC PORTAL TO CHINESE CULTURE, China Pictorial Press