Scholars of Chinese religion generally treat the Qu Yuan narrative as a later attachment to a festival whose customs are considerably older than his fourth century BCE date. The fifth day of the fifth lunar month falls near the summer solstice, a point in the agricultural and seasonal calendar that early Chinese communities marked as dangerous, associated with rising heat, disease, and the emergence of the five poisonous creatures of folk tradition, the snake, scorpion, centipede, toad and spider. Rites recorded from as early as the Han dynasty describe hanging mugwort and calamus at doorways, drinking realgar wine, and other apotropaic measures aimed at protecting the household through the seasonal transition, independent of any connection to a drowned poet.
Regional legends elsewhere in China attach the same date and the same boat races to other figures entirely, including the loyal minister Wu Zixu in parts of the lower Yangtze region, which is itself evidence that the festival's customs predate any single explanatory story and later absorbed several different local heroes as its dominant popular meaning shifted region by region and century by century. Some regional traditions also tie the day to Wu Zixu of the state of Wu, a loyal minister forced to suicide by his own king and, in one version of the story, thrown into the river afterward, folding a second wronged statesman into a festival whose core concern with danger, water and the turn of the seasons predates either man's story.