Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival

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, Canada. It is among the oldest and largest dragon boat festivals held outside Asia, having its roots in 1986 at the Expo 86 world fair, and is one of the few outside 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, Ontario, Canada, an even larger festival in terms of the number of participating crews). 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 themed on transportation, 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, under the leadership of the Chinese Cultural Centre, organized a volunteer committee to introduce the traditional annual Chinese Duanwu Festival (summer solstice) to Canada, as a kind of cultural outreach program to share a lively aspect of Chinese culture with the city's increasingly multi-cultural population.

Trips to Hong Kong were made by Centre volunteers as early as 1984 to investigate the feasibility of bringing back authentic teak wooden dragon boats. The City of Vancouver Centennial Commission endorsed the plan for an inaugural festival as a recognized part of the set of official civic anniversary festivities. While there were hundreds of other sanctioned grassroots centennial projects created that year, only Vancouver's dragon boat festival races continue into the present day.

"Dragon boat festival" was the term colonial Europeans used to refer 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. Duanwu is an ancient term that relates to the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere.

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