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Suppportin
Honesty should be thought when they are g Deatails
still young for them to practice it and will be
used to it when they grow up.
There are many competing explanations for Duanwu Jie, the Dragon Boat
Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar
calendar—this year, May 28. All involve some combination of dragons,
spirits, loyalty, honor and food some of the most important traditions in
Chinese culture. The festival’s main elements now popular the world over—
are racing long, narrow wooden boats decorated with dragons and eating
sticky-rice balls wrapped in bamboo leaves, called zongzi in Mandarin, and
jung in Cantonese.
“Usually, Chinese festivals are explained by the traumatic death of some
great paragon of virtue,” says Andrew Chittick, a professor of East Asian
Humanities at Eckerd College in Florida.
And so the story goes with Qu Yuan, an advisor in the court of Chu during
the Warring States period of ancient China who was exiled by the emperor
for perceived disloyalty. Qu Yuan had proposed a strategic alliance with the
state of Qi in order to fend off the threatening state of Qin, but the emperor
didn’t buy it and sent Qu Yuan off to the wilderness. Unfortunately, Qu
Yuan was right about the threat presented by the Qin, which soon captured
and imprisoned the Chu emperor. The next Chu king surrendered the state
to their rivals. Upon hearing the tragic news, Qu Yuan in 278 B.C. drowned
himself in the Miluo River in Hunan Province.
In the first origin story of zongzi, told during the early Han dynasty, Qu
Yuan became a water spirit after his death. “You can think of it as a ghost,
a spirit energy that has to be appeased. There are a variety of ways one
might appease a ghost but the best and most enduring is to give it food,”
explains Chittick.
For years after Qu Yuan’s death, his supporters threw rice in the water to
feed his spirit, but the food, it was said, was always intercepted by a water
dragon. (Master Chef Martin Yan, author and host of the pioneering Yan
Can Cook TV show, suggests there may have been truth to this: “Some
fresh water fish—like catfish—grow so huge that the Chinese considered
them dragons.”) After a couple of centuries of this frustration, Qu Yuan
came back to tell the people to wrap the rice in leaves, or stuff it into a
bamboo stalk, so the dragon couldn’t eat it. It was only generations later
that people began to retroactively credit Qu Yuan’s erstwhile lifesavers with
starting the rice-ball-tossing tradition.
To make sense of how the water dragon gets into the story, or indeed of
the boats carved with dragons on them, we need to go back further in time
—more than 6,000 years ago, the earliest dated figure of a dragon found
within the boundaries of modern China. “One of the most important
mythical creatures in Chinese mythology, the dragon is the controller of the
rain, the river, the sea, and all other kinds of water; symbol of divine power
and energy…. In the imperial era it was identified as the symbol of imperial
power,” writes Deming An, Ph.D., a professor of folklore at the Institute of
Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing, and co-author
of Handbook of Chinese Mythology. “In people’s imaginations, dragons
usually live in water and are the controllers of rain.”
The penis consists of the root (which is attached to the lower abdominal structures
and pelvic bones), the visible part of the shaft, and the glans penis (the cone-
shaped end).
The scrotum is the thick-skinned sac that surrounds and protects the testes.
The testes are oval bodies that average about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 7 centimeters) in
length and 2 to 3 teaspoons (20 to 25 milliliters) in volume.
The epididymis consists of a single coiled microscopic tube that measures almost
20 feet (6 meters) in length.
vas deferens is a firm tube (the size of a strand of spaghetti) that transports sperm
from the epididymis.
The urethra serves a dual function in males. This channel is the part of the urinary
tract that transports urine from the bladder and the part of the reproductive
system through which semen is ejaculated.
The prostate lies just under the bladder and surrounds the urethra. Walnut-sized
in young men, the prostate enlarges with age.
The seminal vesicles, located above the prostate, join with the vas deferens to
form the ejaculatory ducts, which travel through the prostate. The prostate and the
seminal vesicles produce fluid that nourishes the sperm.
TRADITIONAL COSTUMES IN ASIA