The Ch'ing-Ming or "Pure and Bright" festival is as carefully observed at Weihaiwei as elsewhere throughout China. It is a movable feast generally occurring early in the third Chinese month.[143] Edible delicacies of various kinds are diligently prepared in every household and taken to the family graveyard to be sacrificially offered to the ancestral spirits. At this season, and at the corresponding festival held on the first day of the tenth month, all the members of the family who can attend prostrate themselves on the ground in front of their ancestors' graves.[144] These observances are known as _shang fên_--"going up to the tombs."[145] This is one of the occasions on which family reunions take place. It is a holiday season and there is plenty of jollity and feasting; but the sacrifices and the "sweeping of tombs" are regarded as sacred duties, the omission of which through negligence would show a discreditable lack of filial piety and might entail misfortune on the present and future generations of the family. The virtues of obedience and submission to authority are also emphasised at this season in the village schools, where the pupils formally salute their teachers. An old custom sometimes observed at this time is the wearing of willow-leaves on the head. This is supposed to produce good weather for agriculture. This practice is not so common in Weihaiwei as in Shansi and some parts of Chihli and Honan, where in seasons of drought--only too common in those parts--men and boys go about for many days wearing on their heads wreaths made of fresh willow-branches. The willow is a tree that loves water and the banks of rivers, and willow-wreaths are therefore regarded as rain-charms.[146]
In the third month comes the festival of Corn-rain (_Ku Yü_). This is the appropriate time for obtaining written charms as antidotes against snakes and grubs and venomous or destructive reptiles and insects in general.
The so-called Dragon Festival[147] is held on the fifth day of the fifth month. This is the occasion on which the well-known dragon-boat races take place at Canton and elsewhere in south China. According to tradition, the festival was inaugurated in memory of a high-minded statesman and poet named Ch'ü Yüan of the Ch'ü State (south of the Yangtse) who was driven to commit suicide in the fourth century B.C. It is with the simulated object of recovering his body that the dragon-boats--so named from their length and peculiar shape--annually dash through the waters of the southern rivers. But there are no boat-races of this kind at Weihaiwei. Little cakes called _tsung-tzŭ_--made of rice or millet with a morsel of fruit or sweetmeat inside--are eaten by the people; but there seems to be no local knowledge of the fact that these cakes were originally intended as sacrifices to Ch'ü Yüan and ought to be thrown into flowing water as offerings to his spirit.