A 600-word essay: Why do we need to wear colorful threads during the Dragon Boat Festival?

The Dragon Boat Festival is an ancient traditional festival in China, also known as the Duanyang Festival. It falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month every year. It began in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period in China and has a history of more than 2,000 years. During the Dragon Boat Festival, there are customs of eating rice dumplings, drinking realgar wine, hanging calamus, mugwort, mugwort leaves, smoked atractylodes and angelica, and dragon boat racing. Shanghai New Oriental Youneng Middle School provides a selection of excellent Dragon Boat Festival essays for reference only.

During the Dragon Boat Festival, you will see many people with colorful threads tied on their wrists, but they don’t know what the colorful threads mean. And it seems that they have to wait until the first rain after the Dragon Boat Festival to untie the colorful thread and put it into the water.

Do you know why this is?~

The five colors are composed of five colors: red, yellow, blue, green and purple. In the Ming Dynasty, the five colors were composed of four kinds of overglaze colors: red, yellow, green, and purple, and underglaze blue and white.

The five-colored thread was also called the five-colored thread of longevity in ancient times. The Dragon Boat Festival was originally a festival for girls and is China’s Daughter’s Day.

It is a colorful thread of longevity, which is an ancient custom from the Song Dynasty. Thick red, green, yellow, white and black silk threads are twisted into colorful threads and tied on girls' arms and necks. They are called longevity threads and life-extending threads. Yu Youding of the Ming Dynasty said in his "Five-day Song of the Imperial Capital" that "the life can be extended by tying five threads", which refers to this custom.

Han Dynasty Yingshao's "Customs" records: "On May 5th, five-color silk is tied to the arms, and the name is longevity." Later generations also called it "life-continuation thread". According to this, this custom was directly inherited from the Han Dynasty and has been in existence for two thousand years.

The traditional custom is to twist five-color silk thread into a shape and tie it on the child's arm. It is tied on May 5th and will not be untied until the birthday of "Seventh Mother" on July 7th. Burn.

There is also a saying that on the first rainy day after the Dragon Boat Festival, cutting off the colorful thread and throwing it in the rain will bring you good luck for the year.

Colorful strands are called "five-color thread", "Zhu Suo", "Baisuo", etc. They are essential items for the Dragon Boat Festival. It is a custom in Shaanxi to tie colorful silk threads around children's wrists, ankles and necks on the Dragon Boat Festival. It is said to ward off evil spirits and prevent the five poisons from approaching. This kind of colorful silk strands must be worn until "June 6th" before being cut off and thrown into the river to be washed away. Legends in the Shaanxi area believe that this is related to the deeds of Sun Simiao, the king of medicine. Throwing floral thread into the river means that all diseases are taken away, and it has the property of bringing disaster. Nowadays, silk thread for embroidery is generally used in many colors. It is also gorgeous and flexible in the use of colors, ranging from more than ten colors to two or three colors. There is also flexibility in what colors to use. Some people just use whatever colors they have on hand. On May 5th, adults and children all wear colorful threads, and when they come together, they will compete to see whose one is more beautiful, which is quite interesting. Of course, more sophisticated people still use five-color thread.