1. Cultural Background & Significance
Duan (端节), also known as the Shui New Year or “Water New Year,” is the most magnificent and spiritually significant traditional festival of the Shui ethnic group (水族), who inhabit the karst highlands of Sandu Shui Autonomous County in Guizhou. Celebrated over seven weeks across different Shui clans according to the ancient Shui calendar—typically between August and October in the Gregorian calendar—Duan is a staggered New Year celebration that allows different branches of the Shui people to visit each other in sequence. As the longest-celebrated annual festival among all of China’s ethnic minorities, Duan is a UNESCO-recognized masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage.
The festival’s unique identity is anchored by three extraordinary cultural expressions:
水书历法 The world's only surviving pictographic calendar system, calculated by shamans using the mysterious Shui script.
端坡赛马 Thundering races across mountain grasslands where riders compete without saddles for clan honor.
鱼包韭菜 The festival's sacred dish—fresh fish stuffed with wild chives and herbs, slow-cooked for hours.
2. Lifestyle, Diet & Customs
Duan transforms the karst plateau of Sandu into a seven-week panorama of horse races, ancestral banquets, and shamanic calendar calculations.
🍵 Festive Feasts
Shui festival cuisine reflects their deep connection to rivers, rice paddies, and mountain herbs:
- Fish Wrapped in Chives (鱼包韭菜): The festival’s indispensable sacred dish—fresh grass carp stuffed with wild mountain chives, perilla, and ginger, wrapped in banana leaves and slow-simmered for hours. It symbolizes the Shui people’s aquatic origins.
- Glutinous Rice Wine (九阡酒): A famous sweet rice wine from Jiuqian village, fermented with medicinal herbs and aged in sealed earthenware jars for months.
- Rice Dumplings (粽粑): Large glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in pandan leaves, filled with pork, peanuts, and mung beans, steamed until fragrant.
🏮 Folk Rituals
The festival opens with Shui script calendar calculations performed by village shamans who read the ancient pictographic Shuishu (水书) to determine the exact auspicious dates for each clan’s celebration. On the designated morning, families visit ancestral graves with offerings of fish, rice wine, and glutinous rice. The afternoon erupts into thrilling saddleless horse races on mountain grasslands called Duanpo (端坡)—young men gallop bareback across the slopes, demonstrating clan pride and equestrian prowess. As evening falls, entire villages gather for communal feasts where elders recount Creation myths and sing ancient oral epics.
📜 Myth & Origins
Shui mythology recounts that the ancestors of the Shui people were three brothers who survived a catastrophic flood by floating inside a giant copper drum. When the waters receded, they discovered that their homeland had been destroyed. The eldest brother settled in the upper reaches of the river and established the Shui calendar; the middle brother became the ancestor of the Han Chinese; the youngest became the ancestor of the Miao people. The Duan Festival eternally commemorates the eldest brother’s survival and his gift of the Shui calendar, which regulates agricultural cycles and clan gatherings.
3. Heritage & Modern Celebration
In 2006, Duan Festival was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognized as the longest and most complex New Year celebration in the world. Today, it preserves the endangered Shuishu pictographic script—one of humanity’s last surviving象形文字 systems—and showcases the Shui people’s extraordinary equestrian traditions, aquatic cosmology, and communal social structures.