The Yangtze basin was the country of Chu, whose religious world reaches us through the Chuci, the Songs of the South. Its poems are not the measured ritual hymns of the northern classics but invocations: a spirit is summoned, courted and lost, the speaker travels through the sky, and the river goddesses of the Xiang are addressed directly. Scholars have argued for a century about how far these texts record an actual shamanic practice, but they preserve a religious idiom that the northern canon does not have.
Attached to the same landscape is the death of Qu Yuan, the Chu official who, exiled and despairing of his state, is said to have drowned himself in the Miluo, a tributary of the Yangtze. The tradition holds that people raced boats out to find him and threw rice into the water so the fish would not take his body, and the Dragon Boat Festival on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, with its races and its wrapped rice parcels, is explained by that story across the Chinese world and among its diasporas.
The river itself was worshipped as a power. Its gorges were and are dangerous water, and shrines to dragon kings, to the goddess of Wushan and to local river deities stood at the difficult passages, receiving offerings from boatmen who had reason to make them.