Weird inventions of the Dragon Boat Festival

Weird inventions of the Dragon Boat Festival

The Dragon Boat Festival is a traditional holiday that occurs on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, and this is why it is also called Duānwǔ Jién (Double Fifth festival).

The festival is also celebrated as "Poets' Day" in honor of Qu Yuan, who is known as China's first poet and was a loyal minister of the King of Chu in the third century BC. Accused of false charges of conspiracy and exiled by the king, Qu Yuan drowned himself by attaching a heavy stone to his chest and jumping into the Miluo River. The people of Chu rushed desperately with their boats looking for Qu Yuan but were unable to save him. Every year the Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated with boat races to commemorate this attempt at rescuing Qu Yuan.

The local people began the tradition of throwing sacrificial cooked rice into the river for Qu Yuan, while others believed that the rice would prevent the fishes in the river from eating Qu Yuan’s body.

Patent for Level land dragon boat stage property (source: Espacenet.com)

This festival, which this year falls on June 25th, is quite important for Chinese people (UNESCO added it to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity). During the celebrations, it is used to eat rice dumplings (zongzi), race dragon boats, wear scented small bags (filled with aromatic herbs), balance eggs (you will be lucky all the year if you are able to keep raw eggs standing up), take long walks on the mountains and drink realgar wine (xiónghuángjiǔ).

Patent for Ventilating device for preventing zongzi from being rawish (source: Espacenet.com)

During my research for patents used in the Dragon boat festival (you can’t imagine how many tools are patented to make, transport and preserve zongzi, or to improve the training for boat races in case you can’t use water), I bumped into some weird patents. The subject of the patent was the realgar wine, which is a drink apparently quite common during this festival: they say that“Drinking realgar wine drives evils and diseases away” (a bit like an apple a day).

According to the tradition, not only it does keep away bugs and can be used to treat sores and bug bites, it also acts as a detox for the "Five Poisons" (which are scorpions, snakes, centipedes, lizards and toads. In fact, with the onset of the hot season, these animals proliferate and according to Chinese medicine they can bring diseases or poison the people with whom they come into contact).

Now, I was curious about this realgar wine, and I discovered something interesting.

According to the dictionary, “Realgar wine or xionghuang wine (Chinese: 雄黃酒 , xiónghuángjiǔ) is a Chinese alcoholic drink that consists of Chinese cereal wine (huangjiu, "yellow wine") dosed with powdered realgar, a yellow-orange arsenic sulfide mineral (As4S4). It is traditionally consumed as part of the Dragon Boat Festival”.

Wait… Realgar is an arsenic sulfide mineral?

Yes, it is. Actually, Realgar is an arsenic poison that has an increased effect after mixing with alcohol (mixed with saltpeter, just for you to know, it was used to make fireworks).

Photo credit: Guilinholiday.com

It is also used as a disinfectant to spray into the corners of the room. Elders dip a finger into realgar wine and write a character on the children’s foreheads and spread it on their ears, noses, hands, and feet. It is believed that it will protect children from harm and diseases.

The modern medicine recommends to drink it moderately since it is toxic.

This explains a bit why, apart from one Instant mint soybean milk powder (will you explode after drinking it?), and a Fragrant pig feed, the most part of the patents containing Realgar wine refers to medications, like Insect repelling water-based composition with healthcare function, special medicated bath agent for boer goats, medicated bath preparation for small tailed han sheep breeding, pesticide for mountainous area sunny slope face wheat planting, medicinal liquor for treating beriberi.

A special mention goes to the Method for producing snake-preventing cloth.

For this Dragon Boat Festival, I will stick to the prescriptions and eat delicious zongzi instead.

Silvia Marchi

HFG Law&Intellectual Property