Group shot with Pan Men Pagoda in background

Dragon Boat Festival, Suzhou, Nanjing (Week 2)

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May 29th 2009
On Thursday I went to a Shanghai Jiao Tong University volunteer house to celebrate the traditional dragon boat festival. The festival commemerates the Chinese poet Qu Yuan who drowned himself. According to the story, all the villagers threw rice cakes into the river to keep the fish from eating the poet's body. Today the sticky rice cakes, wrapped in bamboo leaves and filled with pork or red be ... read more

Asia » China » Shanghai

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For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. A... ... read more