Participants compete in a dragon boat race during a dragon boat carnival on the Longgang River in Longgang District, Shenzhen, on Thursday. Twelve teams from Hong Kong, Macao and Guangdong cities took part in the 300-meter race. The event was held to celebrate the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival, or Duanwu Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month in the Chinese lunar calendar, or June 9 this year. For thousands of years, the festival, memorializing the Warring States Period patriotic poet Qu Yuan (340 B.C.-278 B.C.) who drowned himself in a river, has been marked by eating zongzi and racing dragon boats.Wu Jun