Dragon Boat Festivals in Old Shanghai

The Dragon Boat Festival is now a public holiday under the new holidays regimen that replaced the old Golden Weeks system a couple of years back. Nonsense said some – dragon boats are a southern thing – all very well in Hong Kong and Guangdong but rarely if ever seen in Shanghai or north of the Yangtze (indeed obviously rarely seen in Peking due to their being nothing more than a spit of a river, some remnants of Grand Canal and not much water anywhere really). Well here’s proof that Shanghai has long liked dragon boats and that before 1949 they were far more impressive than the skiff type things  you see today. Here’s a multi-manned and rowed dragon boat heading down the Whangpoo – sorry though I don’t have a firm date for this picture.