The earliest boat races in China were rooted in training for naval warfare. The earliest records show that the peoples of the region that is now southern China and southeast Asia used oared longboats for fighting and for demonstrating their military prowess. Oared longboats were fast and maneuverable, and they functioned on water rather as light cavalry did on land: for reconnaissance and patrol, for “special operations” duty behind enemy lines, and, in units of several hundred boats, for occasional massed attacks on rival squadrons or even against much larger armadas of troop-transport and siege vessels. Success in such tactics, especially in often narrow and challenging water environments, required coordinated, high-speed rowing for each boat, and coordinated maneuvers for whole boat squadrons, which in turn required training. With this, boat racing was born. | ![]() Boat model of a (non-military) oared longboat, from the second century AD |
![]() Twelfth century AD painting of imperial naval review showing dragon boats surrounding a Great Dragon Ship
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when
they conquered the south in the 960s and 970s. During the next several
centuries of Song rule, boat racing became a competitive sport in which
the winners were promoted into the imperial navy at the capital
(Kaifeng, now in Henan province). Imperial naval forces staged races
for imperial review at a large lake west of the city. The imperial
boats were always decorated like dragons, which symbolized imperial
authority; as a result, other decorations (birds, tigers, and other
animals and designs) fell out of use, and the races began to be called
"dragon boat jingdu" or just "dragon boat competitions." The Song dynasty was forced to flee south of the Yangzi river, and eventually was conquered by the Mongols in the late 1200s. Over the following centuries, the imperial courts of the Ming and Qing (Manchu) dynasties stopped sponsoring dragon boat racing as a tool for naval recruitment, and the races became entirely local affairs. Races continued to be often more like a mid-river brawl, and participants began using paddles, which allowed them to pack men more tightly into the boats, and to more effectively engage in hand-to-hand |
that disrupted water transport and led to gambling and
fighting, and was often repressed, though it remained widely practiced.
Some reformers thought that it could be turned into a modern sport and
would contribute to a stronger, prouder nation. Some efforts were made
in this direction in the 1920s to 1950s, but the Communist government
decided it represented old feudal customs and banned it in the early
1960s. In 1976 the British-controlled government of Hong Kong began to develop dragon boat racing as a sport to encourage tourism. Over the next ten years, other locations around the world (especially in developed |
![]() Sketch of an early twentieth-century dragon boat on the Yangzi river near Wuhan, Hubei province |