Waterways, Lineages, Borders: A Ritual Folklore Study of the Dragon Boat Festival in Urban Villages in Panyu, Guangzhou

The Dragon Boat Festival as understood by villagers of Guangzhou’s urban villages is not a festival of a single day, but a sequence of dragon boat-related activities, locally called Pa Longzhou, that lasts for nearly a month. During the festival, waterways are used as interactive spaces across villages through the organization of collective rituals, which softens the rigid boundaries and divisions between these villages. In this article, we argue that the festival should be interpreted as a series of waterborne boundary rituals, in which villagers make use of traditional forms to serve present-day purposes. Waterborne transport along rivers and canals conditioned the historical geography of the north central Panyu area of Guangzhou. For families here, the Dragon Boat Festival represents a set of rituals for simultaneously strengthening extended family bonds and maintaining border relations in an estuarine geography that remains structured by the network of waterways even though the area as a whole has long since firmly transitioned into a terrestrial, urban space. Ultimately, this ritual process allows boundaries to proceed effectively through interactions.