On the waterfront at Stanley, the drumming began before the mist had fully lifted. A day after Hong Kong issued two black rainstorm warnings, the skies relented, and 185 teams of paddlers pulled hard through the swell. Naomi Watanabe, a 25-year-old English teacher with the Hong Kong Japanese Dragon Boat Club, had feared the races would be cancelled. Instead, she stood amid the salt spray and shouting, describing a mood of relief and collective energy. “The vibe is really good and we can feel the energy,” she said. That same morning, thousands of spectators pressed into beaches and promenades across Aberdeen, Sha Tin, Tai Po and Sai Kung, their cheers mingling with the percussive beat of the drummers who set the pace for each narrow hull.

Across the strait in Taiwan, the festival took a sharp turn inland. In the historic district of Sanxia, New Taipei, locals and students revived a dragon boat contest that had vanished decades ago when the Sanxia River silted up. This year, 17 teams raced inflatable boats along a 260-metre stretch of Sanxia Old Street, a thoroughfare lined with red-brick arcades from the Japanese colonial era. The rules were unorthodox: competitors had to stop mid-course and eat a prescribed sequence of local treats — taro shaved ice, tofu pudding, pig’s blood cake and golden croissants — before dashing to the finish. A three-member team from Chajiao Elementary School won in four minutes and eight seconds. A parallel contest judged handmade dragon boats built from recycled materials; the winning entry, assembled from straws, plastic plates and bottle caps collected from friends and recycling depots, earned its five-member team NT$10,000. “Our business community is an extension of our culture,” said Lin Feng-bin, chairman of the local business district association, framing the event as both a tourist draw and a means of preserving a century-old heritage.

The festival’s roots stretch back more than two millennia, anchored to the legend of the poet Qu Yuan, who drowned himself in protest and whose body, according to lore, villagers raced to recover, beating drums and throwing rice into the water to distract the fish. Historians in Beijing note that the holiday is among the richest and most regionally varied in the Chinese calendar. Tsinghua University professor Liu Xiaofeng described it as “probably the richest and most diverse of all traditional Chinese festivals,” shaped by local interpretations of the summer solstice and the balance of yin and yang. On the Grand Canal in Beijing’s Tongzhou district, crews from five provinces and municipalities competed over 100, 200 and 500 metres, their paddles slicing the water in unison as residents and tourists lined the banks. A participant named Li Maoshan said the competition “helped strengthen our team spirit” and offered a chance to “demonstrate the spirit of perseverance and hard work.”

The festival’s culinary rituals proved just as elastic. Taiwan’s foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung, posted a social-media video in which he declined Chinese chilli sauce for his zongzi — the pyramid-shaped glutinous rice dumplings eaten across the Chinese-speaking world — and instead reached for a bottle of Belizean hot sauce, followed by a chilled cup of Guatemalan coffee. “The first bite is the familiar taste of Taiwan’s Dragon Boat Festival; the second bite brings the passionate flavours of our ally,” he said, turning a seasonal snack into a gesture of diplomatic signalling. In Hong Kong, some paddlers wore costumes depicting Ne Zha, the cartoon version of a Taoist deity, adding a layer of pop-culture play to the races. Elsewhere, families observed the folk belief that an egg stood upright at noon on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month will absorb positive energy and bring a year of good fortune.

As the afternoon heat settled over the region, the festival’s many forms converged on a single idea: a community in motion, whether on water, on a historic street, or around a table. In Sanxia, the handmade dragon boats — fragile assemblages of discarded objects — were carried away as trophies, their bottle-cap scales glinting under the sun. On the Grand Canal, the last races gave way to families unwrapping zongzi at home. The drumbeats faded, but the story they had marked, of a poet and a search that never really ended, remained suspended in the humid air.