Fishmongers' Drunken Dragon Festival

The Fishmongers' Drunken Dragon Festival is a tradition unique to Macau's fresh-fish trade, passed down for over a century and tracing to the drunken-dragon customs of the Zhongshan area, said to have arisen to drive away plague and pray for peace. On the eighth day of the fourth lunar month (Buddha's birthday) each year the Macau Fresh Fish Trade Association leads a drunken-dragon procession, the dancers drinking to a merry glow before bearing the wooden dragon through the streets to pray for a thriving catch and the peace of the community. It entered the third national ICH list in 2011.

On the festival day the dancers gather near the Red Market, drink rice wine until half-drunk, then wield a wooden dragon that splits into a head and a tail, stumbling and tumbling with comic energy, handing out rice wine and dragon-boat-head rice to passers-by along the route, an unmatched scene of Macau street folklore.

The Drunken Dragon Festival is one of the few surviving traditional festivals in Macau upheld by a trade guild, carrying the city's fishing history, guild culture and migrant customs, a living specimen for the study of Lingnan folk belief and trade folklore, rich in local character.