Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival
Encyclopedia
The Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival or Rio Tinto Alcan Dragon Boat Festival takes place every June on the waters and shoreside of False Creek
in Vancouver
, British Columbia. It is among the oldest and largest dragon boat
festivals held outside of Asia, having its roots in 1986 at the Expo 86
world fair, and one of the few on the planet outside of Asia that holds a festival during the traditional time, around the period of the summer solstice
(the other non-Asian festival celebrating at this time being held in Toronto, Canada). As the title sponsor changes, so does the name of the festival and associated branding.
When Vancouver celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1986, Expo 86, a world exposition, was organized for that summer and held on the shores of north, east and south east False Creek stretching from Granville Bridge east to Science World. For that same year, Vancouver's Chinese Canadian community organized a volunteer committee to introduce the traditional annual Chinese summer solstice festival to Canada, Duan Wu Jie (Tuen Ng Jit), as a centennial project. There were hundreds of other grass-roots community centennial projects held that year, but the Vancouver dragon boat festival races is among the few, if not the only one, of such projects to have continued into the present day. "Dragon boat festival" is how colonial Europeans referred to the annual observance when they first witnessed the boat racing spectacle in Asia in the 19th century. However, the festival is not known as "long zhou jie" (literally, dragon boat festival) in China. Duan Wu is an ancient term that relates to the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere.
The community dragon boat committee contacted the Hong Kong Tourist Association (now the Hong Kong Tourism Board) who had been organizing the 'Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival - International Races' since 1976 as a kind of sport tourism property, and with the financial assistance of key corporate sponsors arranged to have six teak wooden dragonboats along with sets of paddles, drums, steering oars and lau san or ceremonial parasols built in Hong Kong to the local design pattern of the Pearl River Delta region fishermen of southern China and shipped over to Vancouver in time for Expo 86. These boats were afloat on display at the Marine Plaza zone throughout the world's fair when they were not being used for team practices, competitions or ceremonial purposes in support of the Hong Kong Pavilion that summer.
The organizers invited Mr. Mason Hung (a senior vice president of the International Dragonboat Federation from the 1990s onwards), a Product Development Manager with the HKTA, to fly to Vancouver as a consultant to the first-time race committee. He shared the Hong Kong Festival's Rules of Racing for adaptation to and use on False Creek, which like Hong Kong's regatta sea course, was subject to tidal current conditions. These competition rules were originally developed for the Hong Kong Festival International Races in co-operation with the Hong Kong Amateur Rowing Association, who supplied experienced, qualified racing regatta officials to convene and officiate at the competitions. Eventually, these initial rules of racing were overhauled by a Vancouver race committee member who had advanced knowledge and experience in international paddlesport and rowing competition standards. A set of these rules is held by the Vancouver Public Library. These rules have been modified over the years by the race organizers to meet emerging needs, such as long distance racing formats.
Besides for the first ever sport dragon boat race in July 1986 on False Creek, the six dragon boats were also paddled ceremoniously on False Creek to celebrate traditional (and ancient) Chinese culture - not sport - as part of the festivities to mark "Hong Kong Day" at Expo 86.
Two prominent businessmen from Vancouver's Chinese Canadian community, Honourable David See-Chai Lam
and Milton Wong, were honourary patrons of the fledgling dragon boat movement, along with dozens of other notable and corporately connected Vancouverites, many with business ties to Hong Kong and China.
1986 also saw the start-up in Vancouver of the "Asia Pacific Festival" in Vanier Park at which artists and performers from many countries were showcased. The following year, this festival relocated to the former Expo grounds the last week of June, namely at the Plaza of Nations, in a bid to try to rekindle the old Expo spirit and feeling.
A food fair featuring cuisine from around the Asia Pacific was featured along with several days of performances by globally sourced entertainers. Concurrently, Vancouver's second annual dragonboat races were played out on the waters of False Creek in 1987 adjacent to what was then known as Enterprise Hall, a partly glass permanent structure left over from Expo 86 that is now the Edgewater Casino. This Asia Pacific Festival event property did not continue past 1987, however the mold for a colourful, family-friendly annual event format each June which combined a shore-based land festival featuring entertainment and international food selection with two days of non-stop dragonboat racing was cast and continues to this day. The model originated in Hong Kong and spread to not only Vancouver, but also to Toronto and Ottawa, all of which showcase on the order of 150 to 200 crews of 25 competitors over a weekend of exciting boat races.
In the summer of 1988 Wong and Lam agreed to spearhead an assistive effort to build up the annual Vancouver Dragonboat Festival into a more elaborate affair, something more along the lines of Hong Kong's international festival. The property was billed, somewhat pretentiously perhaps, as the Canadian International Dragonboat Festival as if the Vancouver festival was the principal race for the entire nation. However, it should also be noted that the annual exhibition in Toronto Ontario Canada is entitled the Canadian National Exhibition
(The "Ex" or the CNE) to Vancouver's regional Pacific National Exhibition or PNE).
This internationalization effort involved inviting and hosting dragon boat teams from overseas to compete at Vancouver's False Creek festival regatta. In 1989 – the very first year of the dragonboat festival billed as "Canadian International" - and over the next few years until funding ran out, teams flew over from Indonesia, Japan, England, Germany and Australia to compete against dragonboat teams from Canada and the USA. However, with sponsorship revenues falling far short of total expenses, including for festival cultural performances by such noteworthy professional acts as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the CIDBF Society, a not-for-profit corporation, incurred considerable debt in its early years of startup which eventually led to the reduction in the number of overseas international teams participating on False Creek. International came to mean 'from the USA' with occasional teams from beyond North America.
Due to the debt load in the late 90s as well as the rise of the IDBF multi-national world championships system for national and for club crews starting from the mid-1990s, overseas teams no longer flew in to compete in Vancouver in great numbers as in the past. However, in 1996, 10 years after the Vancouver's original race, the 1st IDBF World Championship for Club Crews was convened on False Creek during the festival. (Ten years after that in 2006, Toronto hosted the 5th IDBF WCCC.) The Vancouver international races of 1996 marked the first time ever for a state-sponsored dragonboat team from China to compete outside of Asia and attracted crews from Australia, New Zealand, Germany and England.
This North American west coast dragon boat festival was created not for the pursuit of amateur athletic sport excellence per se, nor for promoting Chinese traditional culture per se, but rather as a meeting place for increasing numbers of Vancouver's culturally diverse population to learn about intercultural harmony and understanding - among both the more recently arrived immigrants of the past 50 years and those who immigrated to British Columbia more than a century ago, such as BC's earliest arrivals from Scotland, England, China and India.
The post-Expo 86 era was marked by concern among some members of the mainstream community over investments in the local residential real estate market by Chinese purchasers from Hong Kong, of whom there was a further influx into Vancouver following the Tiananmen Square
student demonstration in 1989.
One of the companies of a Hong Kong property magnate had purchased the former Expo lands from the Province of BC for a price that was later considered by some pundits to be somewhat below the potential highest value. At any rate, residential real estate development raised up from the former Expo sites. So Wong's and Lam's idea was to try to engender cross-cultural tolerance and understanding through friendly amateur, traditional Chinese boat racing accessible to all on the waters of False Creek, accompanied by multicultural entertainment, culinary and other edutainment experiences on land along the lines of the Asia Pacific Festival model.
Nowadays, Vancouverites and visitors alike are attracted to the festival site and waterfront to experience ethnically themed food, cultural entertainment, fine arts and children's programming all of which reflect Vancouver's cultural diversity, along with exciting weekend warrior boat races. By the year 2020, Statistics Canada growth projections forecast that more than 50% of Vancouver's population will be of non-European origin. As of the most recent federal census, 51% of Vancouver residents speak something other than English as their first language.
The festival and races over the past 25 years have developed into one of Vancouver's most anticipated annual family summer events, attracting some 150+ teams of 25 people ranging in age from high school students to 'grand dragons' in their 60s, 70s and even 80s.
The festival is also affiliated to the Candian International Dragon Boat Festival Foundation, a fund-raising arm which once annually organized high-profile gala dinners towards retiring the debt incurred by the festival in its earliest years and to fund the promoting of intercultural understanding.
The number of lanes was gradually increased to 9 as the number of boats available for racing increased and as the number of teams grew from the initial 18 in 1986 to 100 in the early 1990s to 150+ in this decade. The distance was eventually reduced to 500 metres from 640 metres in keeping with the development of international standards by the IDBF, which races 250m, 500m and 1000m and long distance circuit races.
The land portion of the festival, with its docks interfacing False Creek for exchanging crews, has also varied over the last 2 dozen years. Venues include the Plaza of Nations (one of the former sites of Expo 86) on the north shore, Science World on the east shore and, today, Creekside Community Recreation Centre on the south shore.
The False Creek race course, being an inlet of English Bay and the Strait of Georgia of the Pacific ocean is subject to twice daily tidal streams or tidal currents. The water can be flowing in the same direction boats race (similar effect of a tail wind: shorter time required to go from the start line to the finish line), the opposite direction (similar effect to a head wind: longer time required to go from start to finish), or there is no current during slack tide. Consequently, the published race result elapsed times are meaningless since the boats are not handicapped to correct for head or tail current effects. Since times are not offset to account for either the varying rates and directions of the racing waters, published times are misleading, although novice and even intermediate teams and coaches don't seem to factor in this effect.
Furthermore, at lower low tide, the outside lanes especially closest to the north shore can become very shallow relative to the deeper centre lanes, which disadvantages teams who draw the most northerly lane under these conditions.
However, racing tactics and strategy can be more challenging due to the varying racing conditions throughout the day, as compared to racing on a still water regatta course.
Paddles were originally made out of a single piece of an Asian hardwood in the Pearl River Delta style and were produced in and imported from Hong Kong. A Vancouver paddler with the False Creek Racing Canoe Club gave a sample of one of these paddles to Grey Owl Paddles in Ontario in the late 1980s, and this company has gone on to produce more dragonboat blades (with laminated shaft and blade) than any other manufacturer in the world. Grey Owl paddles were the festival standard until the development of the IDBF specification sport racing paddle, which is now the standard worldwide. The IDBF regulation blade pattern was developed by a former Vancouver dragonboat paddler and False Creek Racing Canoe Club commodore who had served on the executive of the world dragonboat racing federation and its technical commission.
CIDBF from the beginning made the wearing of personal flotation vests by all crew members (paddlers, drummers, steersmen) mandatory while in competition given the very cold ocean water temperature of False Creek year-round, which is something the world federation does not insist upon due to the IDBF's rigorous safety standards, checks, procedures and rescue facilities.
False Creek
False Creek is a short inlet in the heart of Vancouver. It separates downtown from the rest of the city. It was named by George Henry Richards during his Hydrographic survey of 1856-63. Science World is located at its eastern end and the Burrard Street Bridge crosses its western end. False Creek is...
in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, British Columbia. It is among the oldest and largest dragon boat
Dragon boat
A dragon boat is a human-powered watercraft traditionally made, in the Pearl River delta region of southern China - Guangdong Province, of teak wood to various designs and sizes. In other parts of China different woods are used to build these traditional watercraft...
festivals held outside of Asia, having its roots in 1986 at the Expo 86
Expo 86
The 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, or simply Expo '86, was a World's Fair held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from Friday, May 2 until Monday, October 13, 1986...
world fair, and one of the few on the planet outside of Asia that holds a festival during the traditional time, around the period of the summer solstice
Summer solstice
The summer solstice occurs exactly when the axial tilt of a planet's semi-axis in a given hemisphere is most inclined towards the star that it orbits. Earth's maximum axial tilt to our star, the Sun, during a solstice is 23° 26'. Though the summer solstice is an instant in time, the term is also...
(the other non-Asian festival celebrating at this time being held in Toronto, Canada). As the title sponsor changes, so does the name of the festival and associated branding.
When Vancouver celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1986, Expo 86, a world exposition, was organized for that summer and held on the shores of north, east and south east False Creek stretching from Granville Bridge east to Science World. For that same year, Vancouver's Chinese Canadian community organized a volunteer committee to introduce the traditional annual Chinese summer solstice festival to Canada, Duan Wu Jie (Tuen Ng Jit), as a centennial project. There were hundreds of other grass-roots community centennial projects held that year, but the Vancouver dragon boat festival races is among the few, if not the only one, of such projects to have continued into the present day. "Dragon boat festival" is how colonial Europeans referred to the annual observance when they first witnessed the boat racing spectacle in Asia in the 19th century. However, the festival is not known as "long zhou jie" (literally, dragon boat festival) in China. Duan Wu is an ancient term that relates to the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere.
The community dragon boat committee contacted the Hong Kong Tourist Association (now the Hong Kong Tourism Board) who had been organizing the 'Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival - International Races' since 1976 as a kind of sport tourism property, and with the financial assistance of key corporate sponsors arranged to have six teak wooden dragonboats along with sets of paddles, drums, steering oars and lau san or ceremonial parasols built in Hong Kong to the local design pattern of the Pearl River Delta region fishermen of southern China and shipped over to Vancouver in time for Expo 86. These boats were afloat on display at the Marine Plaza zone throughout the world's fair when they were not being used for team practices, competitions or ceremonial purposes in support of the Hong Kong Pavilion that summer.
The organizers invited Mr. Mason Hung (a senior vice president of the International Dragonboat Federation from the 1990s onwards), a Product Development Manager with the HKTA, to fly to Vancouver as a consultant to the first-time race committee. He shared the Hong Kong Festival's Rules of Racing for adaptation to and use on False Creek, which like Hong Kong's regatta sea course, was subject to tidal current conditions. These competition rules were originally developed for the Hong Kong Festival International Races in co-operation with the Hong Kong Amateur Rowing Association, who supplied experienced, qualified racing regatta officials to convene and officiate at the competitions. Eventually, these initial rules of racing were overhauled by a Vancouver race committee member who had advanced knowledge and experience in international paddlesport and rowing competition standards. A set of these rules is held by the Vancouver Public Library. These rules have been modified over the years by the race organizers to meet emerging needs, such as long distance racing formats.
Besides for the first ever sport dragon boat race in July 1986 on False Creek, the six dragon boats were also paddled ceremoniously on False Creek to celebrate traditional (and ancient) Chinese culture - not sport - as part of the festivities to mark "Hong Kong Day" at Expo 86.
Two prominent businessmen from Vancouver's Chinese Canadian community, Honourable David See-Chai Lam
David Lam
- External links :**...
and Milton Wong, were honourary patrons of the fledgling dragon boat movement, along with dozens of other notable and corporately connected Vancouverites, many with business ties to Hong Kong and China.
1986 also saw the start-up in Vancouver of the "Asia Pacific Festival" in Vanier Park at which artists and performers from many countries were showcased. The following year, this festival relocated to the former Expo grounds the last week of June, namely at the Plaza of Nations, in a bid to try to rekindle the old Expo spirit and feeling.
A food fair featuring cuisine from around the Asia Pacific was featured along with several days of performances by globally sourced entertainers. Concurrently, Vancouver's second annual dragonboat races were played out on the waters of False Creek in 1987 adjacent to what was then known as Enterprise Hall, a partly glass permanent structure left over from Expo 86 that is now the Edgewater Casino. This Asia Pacific Festival event property did not continue past 1987, however the mold for a colourful, family-friendly annual event format each June which combined a shore-based land festival featuring entertainment and international food selection with two days of non-stop dragonboat racing was cast and continues to this day. The model originated in Hong Kong and spread to not only Vancouver, but also to Toronto and Ottawa, all of which showcase on the order of 150 to 200 crews of 25 competitors over a weekend of exciting boat races.
In the summer of 1988 Wong and Lam agreed to spearhead an assistive effort to build up the annual Vancouver Dragonboat Festival into a more elaborate affair, something more along the lines of Hong Kong's international festival. The property was billed, somewhat pretentiously perhaps, as the Canadian International Dragonboat Festival as if the Vancouver festival was the principal race for the entire nation. However, it should also be noted that the annual exhibition in Toronto Ontario Canada is entitled the Canadian National Exhibition
Canadian National Exhibition
Canadian National Exhibition , also known as The Ex, is an annual event that takes place at Exhibition Place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada during the 18 days leading up to and including Labour Day Monday. With an attendance of approximately 1.3 million visitors each season, it is Canada’s largest...
(The "Ex" or the CNE) to Vancouver's regional Pacific National Exhibition or PNE).
This internationalization effort involved inviting and hosting dragon boat teams from overseas to compete at Vancouver's False Creek festival regatta. In 1989 – the very first year of the dragonboat festival billed as "Canadian International" - and over the next few years until funding ran out, teams flew over from Indonesia, Japan, England, Germany and Australia to compete against dragonboat teams from Canada and the USA. However, with sponsorship revenues falling far short of total expenses, including for festival cultural performances by such noteworthy professional acts as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the CIDBF Society, a not-for-profit corporation, incurred considerable debt in its early years of startup which eventually led to the reduction in the number of overseas international teams participating on False Creek. International came to mean 'from the USA' with occasional teams from beyond North America.
Due to the debt load in the late 90s as well as the rise of the IDBF multi-national world championships system for national and for club crews starting from the mid-1990s, overseas teams no longer flew in to compete in Vancouver in great numbers as in the past. However, in 1996, 10 years after the Vancouver's original race, the 1st IDBF World Championship for Club Crews was convened on False Creek during the festival. (Ten years after that in 2006, Toronto hosted the 5th IDBF WCCC.) The Vancouver international races of 1996 marked the first time ever for a state-sponsored dragonboat team from China to compete outside of Asia and attracted crews from Australia, New Zealand, Germany and England.
This North American west coast dragon boat festival was created not for the pursuit of amateur athletic sport excellence per se, nor for promoting Chinese traditional culture per se, but rather as a meeting place for increasing numbers of Vancouver's culturally diverse population to learn about intercultural harmony and understanding - among both the more recently arrived immigrants of the past 50 years and those who immigrated to British Columbia more than a century ago, such as BC's earliest arrivals from Scotland, England, China and India.
The post-Expo 86 era was marked by concern among some members of the mainstream community over investments in the local residential real estate market by Chinese purchasers from Hong Kong, of whom there was a further influx into Vancouver following the Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square is a large city square in the center of Beijing, China, named after the Tiananmen Gate located to its North, separating it from the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is the third largest city square in the world...
student demonstration in 1989.
One of the companies of a Hong Kong property magnate had purchased the former Expo lands from the Province of BC for a price that was later considered by some pundits to be somewhat below the potential highest value. At any rate, residential real estate development raised up from the former Expo sites. So Wong's and Lam's idea was to try to engender cross-cultural tolerance and understanding through friendly amateur, traditional Chinese boat racing accessible to all on the waters of False Creek, accompanied by multicultural entertainment, culinary and other edutainment experiences on land along the lines of the Asia Pacific Festival model.
Nowadays, Vancouverites and visitors alike are attracted to the festival site and waterfront to experience ethnically themed food, cultural entertainment, fine arts and children's programming all of which reflect Vancouver's cultural diversity, along with exciting weekend warrior boat races. By the year 2020, Statistics Canada growth projections forecast that more than 50% of Vancouver's population will be of non-European origin. As of the most recent federal census, 51% of Vancouver residents speak something other than English as their first language.
The festival and races over the past 25 years have developed into one of Vancouver's most anticipated annual family summer events, attracting some 150+ teams of 25 people ranging in age from high school students to 'grand dragons' in their 60s, 70s and even 80s.
The festival is also affiliated to the Candian International Dragon Boat Festival Foundation, a fund-raising arm which once annually organized high-profile gala dinners towards retiring the debt incurred by the festival in its earliest years and to fund the promoting of intercultural understanding.
Venue & Regatta Course
The initial races for Expo 86 were held on the water just to the west of the Cambie Street Bridge, using the grassy green space of False Creek Slopes (on the south side of the creek) for the land festivities. Subsequently, a race course of 6 lanes of 640 metres in length (i.e. the same distance as in Hong Kong's Tsim Sha Tsui harbour) was surveyed to the east of the Cambie Street Bridge.The number of lanes was gradually increased to 9 as the number of boats available for racing increased and as the number of teams grew from the initial 18 in 1986 to 100 in the early 1990s to 150+ in this decade. The distance was eventually reduced to 500 metres from 640 metres in keeping with the development of international standards by the IDBF, which races 250m, 500m and 1000m and long distance circuit races.
The land portion of the festival, with its docks interfacing False Creek for exchanging crews, has also varied over the last 2 dozen years. Venues include the Plaza of Nations (one of the former sites of Expo 86) on the north shore, Science World on the east shore and, today, Creekside Community Recreation Centre on the south shore.
The False Creek race course, being an inlet of English Bay and the Strait of Georgia of the Pacific ocean is subject to twice daily tidal streams or tidal currents. The water can be flowing in the same direction boats race (similar effect of a tail wind: shorter time required to go from the start line to the finish line), the opposite direction (similar effect to a head wind: longer time required to go from start to finish), or there is no current during slack tide. Consequently, the published race result elapsed times are meaningless since the boats are not handicapped to correct for head or tail current effects. Since times are not offset to account for either the varying rates and directions of the racing waters, published times are misleading, although novice and even intermediate teams and coaches don't seem to factor in this effect.
Furthermore, at lower low tide, the outside lanes especially closest to the north shore can become very shallow relative to the deeper centre lanes, which disadvantages teams who draw the most northerly lane under these conditions.
However, racing tactics and strategy can be more challenging due to the varying racing conditions throughout the day, as compared to racing on a still water regatta course.
Boats, Paddles & Personal Flotation Vests
Vancouver's festival has used a wide variety of types and brands of dragonboats over the past 25 years, including the original 6 teak wooden boats from Hong Kong for Hong Kong Day at Expo 86, (plus an additional 3 more purchased and imported in 1988 for a total of 9); locally produced, longer and wider 22 paddler Six-Sixteen fibreglass boats; and, currently, IDBF specification international class sport racing boats for 20 and for 10 paddlers from a variety of manufactureres from Europe and Asia.Paddles were originally made out of a single piece of an Asian hardwood in the Pearl River Delta style and were produced in and imported from Hong Kong. A Vancouver paddler with the False Creek Racing Canoe Club gave a sample of one of these paddles to Grey Owl Paddles in Ontario in the late 1980s, and this company has gone on to produce more dragonboat blades (with laminated shaft and blade) than any other manufacturer in the world. Grey Owl paddles were the festival standard until the development of the IDBF specification sport racing paddle, which is now the standard worldwide. The IDBF regulation blade pattern was developed by a former Vancouver dragonboat paddler and False Creek Racing Canoe Club commodore who had served on the executive of the world dragonboat racing federation and its technical commission.
CIDBF from the beginning made the wearing of personal flotation vests by all crew members (paddlers, drummers, steersmen) mandatory while in competition given the very cold ocean water temperature of False Creek year-round, which is something the world federation does not insist upon due to the IDBF's rigorous safety standards, checks, procedures and rescue facilities.