Water-Splashing FestivalOrigins of the Water-Splashing Festival

To understand the origins of the Water-Splashing Festival, it is useful to begin with its names. The various Dai terms for the festival preserve important clues about its calendrical, religious, and cultural history.

Three Forms of the Dai Name

The Water-Splashing Festival is known by several names in Dai-speaking communities, each emphasising a different aspect of the celebration.

One of the more formal names is Sangkhan Bimai, referring to the transition into the New Year. The element corresponding to *Sangkhan* is related to the Indic term saṃkrānti, meaning a “transition,” “passage,” or “movement from one state into another.” *Bimai* means “New Year.” Together, the expression conveys the idea of entering the New Year and directly reflects the festival’s character as the Dai New Year celebration.

Bimai, meaning simply “New Year,” is also widely used and places the emphasis on the calendrical transition from the old year to the new.

Among Dai communities in Xishuangbanna and Dehong, forms traditionally rendered in Chinese as Shanghan (尚罕) and Shangjian (尚键) are also encountered. These names are likewise generally associated with Indic terms derived from *saṃkrānti*, referring to transition or change and, in calendrical contexts, to the movement of the sun from one zodiacal position to another.

This vocabulary reflects the historical influence of South Asian astronomy, calendrical systems, and religious culture on the Dai calendar.

The Chinese Name “Buddha-Bathing Festival”

In Chinese, the Water-Splashing Festival has also historically been called the Buddha-Bathing Festival (浴佛节).

This name highlights one of its most important religious rituals. During the festival, people traditionally dress in festive clothing and visit Buddhist monasteries, where clean water is respectfully poured over Buddha images. The act symbolically removes dust and impurity and expresses devotion, merit-making, and hopes for blessing in the coming year.

The Buddha-bathing ritual represents one of the clearest links between the festival and the religious traditions transmitted from South and Southeast Asia.

Chinese intangible-cultural-heritage descriptions commonly emphasise this connection, presenting the festival as a Dai New Year tradition whose historical development is closely associated with Brahmanical ritual culture and its later incorporation into Buddhist practice.

The Meaning of “Water Splashing” in Dai Ritual Culture

The act that modern visitors most readily associate with the festival—splashing water on other people—was historically embedded in a much broader ritual understanding of water.

In Dai religious usage, particular verbs and expressions associated with pouring or sprinkling water may refer specifically to the respectful bathing of Buddha images and therefore carry a strong sense of reverence.

This suggests that water splashing did not originally function solely as entertainment. Within the religious dimension of the festival, water was first and foremost a medium of ritual purification and devotion.

Over time, this ritual use of water expanded into a wider social custom. Water was poured not only over sacred images but also over other people as a blessing. What began as a religious act thus became part of a broader communal celebration.

From Sangkhan Bimai and Bimai to regional Dai forms such as Shanghan, and from these to the Chinese designation Buddha-Bathing Festival, the names of the celebration preserve a compressed history of cultural exchange. They contain echoes of Indic astronomy, Buddhist ritual, Dai New Year traditions, and the ways in which Chinese-language communities came to understand and describe the festival.

The origins of the Water-Splashing Festival cannot be reduced to a single historical event.

A useful way of understanding its formation is to distinguish three cultural layers:

1. a distant tradition of ceremonial water splashing associated in some Chinese historical interpretations with Pohan Huxi and the cultures of Persia and Central Asia; 2. the more direct influence of South Asian Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions of ritual purification and Buddha bathing; 3. the indigenous Dai traditions of water reverence, rainmaking, and wet-rice agriculture.

Rather than representing three completely separate origins, these traditions appear in later cultural interpretation as overlapping layers that helped shape the festival into the form known today.

A Distant Persian and Central Asian Connection

Some Chinese reference works and scholarly interpretations trace a distant precursor of the Water-Splashing Festival to a practice known as Pohan Huxi (泼寒胡戏), sometimes rendered as “cold-splashing Hu entertainment.”

Historical descriptions associate this performance with peoples of the Western Regions and with customs involving water, winter, collective celebration, and prayers for favourable weather.

The Chinese term itself contains several elements. *Po* means “to splash”; *han* refers to cold; and *Hu* was a broad historical Chinese designation for various peoples to the west and northwest of China. The term therefore describes a water-splashing performance of foreign or Central Asian origin.

Accounts of such customs contrast strikingly with the modern Water-Splashing Festival. Whereas the contemporary Dai celebration takes place in the warmth of April, Pohan Huxi was associated with colder conditions. This contrast illustrates an important feature of cultural transmission: traditions frequently change their season, meaning, and social function as they move into new environments.

According to one line of interpretation, water-splashing customs travelled eastward through the networks of exchange linking Persia, Central Asia, South Asia, and China.

In this reconstruction, the custom did not remain unchanged. As it encountered Indian religious culture, water acquired increasingly explicit associations with purification, ritual bathing, and renewal. From South Asia, related practices continued into mainland Southeast Asia, where they interacted with Theravada Buddhist New Year traditions.

The Thai term Songkran, for example, ultimately derives from the Indic concept of *saṃkrānti*, meaning a calendrical transition. Related terminology also appears in Dai-speaking communities.

The linguistic relationship does not by itself prove a single uninterrupted line of transmission from ancient Persia to the modern Dai festival. It does, however, illustrate the deep historical connections linking South Asian calendrical culture, Theravada Buddhist societies, and New Year traditions across mainland Southeast Asia and southwestern China.

Traditional accounts generally describe two broad routes through which water-related customs entered China: one through Central Asia into the Chinese heartland, and another through South and Southeast Asia into Yunnan.

The modern Dai Water-Splashing Festival belongs primarily to the latter cultural sphere.

The South Asian Religious Source

If the Persian and Central Asian connection is regarded as a distant historical layer, South Asian religious traditions provide a more direct framework for understanding the ritual use of water in the festival.

Ancient Indian religious traditions placed great importance on water as a medium of purification. In Brahmanical practice, ritual bathing and the use of sacred water were closely associated with cleansing, renewal, merit, and religious observance.

Calendrical traditions of South Asia also attached significance to the movement of the sun through the zodiac. The transition associated with the sun’s movement into a new zodiacal position, particularly around the beginning of a new annual cycle in some regional calendrical traditions, came to be expressed through terms derived from saṃkrānti.

This same linguistic family underlies the names of several New Year festivals in South and Southeast Asia.

As Buddhism developed in India and later spread across Asia, ritual bathing acquired Buddhist interpretations as well.

In East Asian Buddhist tradition, the Bathing of the Buddha commemorates the birth of Śākyamuni Buddha. One widely known legendary account tells of dragons or celestial beings pouring fragrant or pure water over the newborn Buddha. The ritual therefore became an act of reverence, purification, and commemoration.

When Theravada Buddhism became established among Dai communities, ritual bathing of Buddha images became an important part of the New Year observance. Festival participants visit monasteries, pour pure water over Buddha images, make offerings, listen to chanting, and seek religious merit and blessings.

The festival’s relationship with Theravada Buddhism is therefore fundamental, although the festival as practised by the Dai cannot be explained by Buddhism alone.

Its development reflects a combination of Buddhist ritual and local social custom.

One important transformation was the expansion from bathing the Buddha to blessing other people with water.

Within the monastery, water expressed reverence toward the Buddha. Within the community, the same symbolic language of purification and blessing gradually came to structure interpersonal exchange. Sprinkling or splashing water on another person became a way of wishing them good fortune and cleansing away the misfortunes of the previous year.

The religious rite and the popular celebration therefore belong to the same symbolic world, even though their atmosphere and social function differ considerably.

The Indigenous Dai Foundation

The Water-Splashing Festival could not have taken such deep root in Dai society without the cultural importance of water already present in the Dai homeland.

The Dai are a people whose historical way of life has been closely connected with rivers, irrigation, monsoon rainfall, and wet-rice agriculture.

A well-known Dai saying is often translated along the lines of:

“Elephants follow the forest, bamboo follows the climate, and the Dai follow the water.”

The saying captures the close relationship between Dai settlement and waterways.

In Xishuangbanna and Dehong, major river systems—including the Lancang, Nujiang, and Ruili rivers and their tributaries—have shaped agriculture, settlement, transportation, and everyday life for generations.

Rice cultivation has traditionally been one of the foundations of Dai society. Water is therefore not simply a natural resource: it is closely associated with life, fertility, prosperity, and continuity.

This relationship also acquired strong aesthetic and emotional meanings.

Water appears throughout the everyday cultural landscape of Dai communities: people carrying water at dawn, children fishing along riverbanks, fields fed by irrigation channels, villages built close to rivers, and social life organised around the rhythm of the monsoon.

Such images are not merely picturesque. They reflect an ecological reality in which the agricultural year depends on the movement between dry and rainy seasons.

Before the establishment of Theravada Buddhism, Dai ancestors are believed to have maintained indigenous rituals connected with natural forces, water, rain, and agricultural fertility.

Prayers for rain were particularly meaningful in a tropical monsoon environment. Around April, the dry season approaches its end and communities begin to anticipate the arrival of the rains.

A water-centred New Year celebration at this moment therefore possesses a strong agricultural logic.

The water symbolically poured during the festival may be understood not only as a means of purification but also as an expression of hope for the rains that will sustain the next agricultural cycle.

When Buddhist water rituals entered this cultural environment, they encountered a society in which water already carried profound spiritual and practical significance.

The Buddhist act of bathing the Buddha and indigenous practices of praying for rain therefore found a natural point of convergence.

One used water to express reverence and purification; the other associated water with rainfall, fertility, and agricultural renewal.

Over time, these meanings became difficult to separate.

Scholarly interpretations of the festival frequently describe it as a product of precisely this cultural synthesis: Theravada Buddhist New Year rites interacting with the rice-farming traditions and customary practices of Dai communities between roughly the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and thereafter.

Dai Origin Legends

Dai communities also preserve a number of popular legends explaining why people splash water during the New Year.

These stories should not be treated as literal historical accounts. Their importance lies instead in the cultural meanings they attach to water, morality, renewal, and collective memory.

One of the best-known stories concerns seven young women who defeat an evil ruler or demon.

According to one version, a cruel supernatural being known as Pengma Diandalazha seized seven beautiful women and forced them to become his wives. The women hated his cruelty.

The seventh eventually discovered his hidden weakness. Taking advantage of the moment, the women used hair to sever his head.

But the demon’s death created a new danger.

When his severed head touched the ground, flames erupted. When it was thrown into water, floods threatened the land. The seven women therefore had to take turns holding the head.

Whenever one woman passed it to the next, water was used to wash away the pollution associated with it.

In later popular interpretation, the annual custom of splashing water commemorated the courage and sacrifice of these women while transforming cleansing into an act of blessing.

Versions told in Dehong sometimes describe the seven women taking turns over a period of seven days, linking the legend with the duration of traditional New Year observances.

Another legend centres on a heroic Dai man sometimes named Liliang.

In this story, the land is struck by calamity: rain disappears, the seasons lose their proper order, and destructive fire threatens the community. Liliang risks his life to fetch water from the Jinsha River and repeatedly throws it over the flames until the fire is finally extinguished.

The villagers survive and later commemorate him through water-splashing rituals.

These legends differ considerably in plot and character, but their symbolic structure is similar.

Water defeats destruction. It removes pollution. It saves life. It marks gratitude and renewal.

The stories therefore reveal how Dai communities have culturally interpreted the festival even when they do not provide evidence for its historical origins.

Northern and Southern Dynasties Period

Some Chinese historical interpretations trace the most distant precursor of later water-splashing customs to Pohan Huxi, which is associated with western or Central Asian cultures and is sometimes linked with ancient Persia.

From roughly the fifth century onward, customs and performances from Central and Western Asia travelled eastward through the networks now collectively described as the Silk Roads.

According to the transmission model presented in some Chinese ethnographic accounts, water-splashing practices subsequently encountered South Asian religious traditions and acquired new associations with purification and ritual bathing.

This phase is better understood as part of the wider cultural background of the later festival than as the existence of the modern Dai Water-Splashing Festival itself.

The recognisable Dai festival emerged much later, after these wider religious and calendrical traditions reached mainland Southeast Asia and southwestern China.

Tang Dynasty

By the Tang dynasty, Pohan Huxi was known in China.

Historical texts record foreign-style water-splashing performances at the Tang court. Participants reportedly splashed one another with water, danced, and took part in exuberant public entertainment.

In 713, the first year of the Kaiyuan era, Emperor Xuanzong ordered the practice prohibited at court. Traditional accounts associate the prohibition with concerns about the spectacle of people dancing scantily clothed or naked and the perceived incompatibility of such behaviour with court decorum.

The Central Asian form of the custom therefore did not develop into a lasting mainstream festival in the Chinese heartland.

At the same time, however, South and Southeast Asia were developing their own calendrical New Year traditions associated with Theravada Buddhism and Indic concepts of seasonal transition.

The word Songkran, used in Thailand and neighbouring cultural regions, derives from the same Indic linguistic family as *saṃkrānti*. Related forms found among Dai communities preserve the same idea of calendrical transition.

This shared vocabulary reflects the deep historical connections linking the Dai cultural region with the broader Theravada Buddhist world of mainland Southeast Asia.

Song and Yuan Periods

The form of the Water-Splashing Festival most directly connected with modern Dai practice developed in association with the spread of Theravada Buddhism into the Dai regions of Yunnan.

Different modern reference sources give somewhat different chronologies, generally placing the important phase of transmission between approximately the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

This was a period in which Theravada Buddhist traditions expanded from mainland Southeast Asia, particularly through areas corresponding to present-day Myanmar, into Dai-speaking regions of Yunnan.

Geography facilitated the exchange. Dai communities of southwestern China shared extensive cultural, linguistic, economic, and religious connections with Tai-speaking peoples across what are now the borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand.

As Buddhist institutions became more firmly established, New Year observances increasingly incorporated monastery-based ritual.

A particularly important development was the joining of New Year and Buddha-bathing traditions.

The celebration came to fall around the middle of the sixth month of the traditional Dai calendar, corresponding approximately to mid-April in the Gregorian calendar. This timing also coincided with an important seasonal transition between the dry period and the approaching rainy season.

The festival thus acquired a dual identity.

It was both a Buddhist observance involving monasteries, merit-making, chanting, offerings, and Buddha bathing, and a Dai New Year festival marked by social renewal, community gathering, and seasonal celebration.

This combination of religious ritual and popular custom would become one of the central characteristics of the Water-Splashing Festival.

Ming and Qing Dynasties

During the Ming and Qing periods, the Water-Splashing Festival became increasingly embedded in local Dai society.

Its earlier religious framework remained important. Participants visited Buddhist monasteries, listened to chanting, made offerings, and bathed Buddha images.

At the same time, the festival accumulated a much wider range of social and recreational activities.

Historical and ethnographic descriptions suggest that in some areas the celebration may initially have been concentrated among communities practising Theravada Buddhism and may not always have involved the entire population in the form seen today.

Over time, participation broadened.

Local customs were incorporated into the New Year season, and the festival gradually developed into a comprehensive community celebration.

Activities came to include water splashing, temple fairs and markets, dragon-boat racing, the launching of traditional rockets, sky lanterns, courtship games involving cloth bags, singing, dancing, and other forms of communal entertainment.

Many of these practices had strong roots in local Dai life.

Dragon-boat traditions reflected the close relationship between Dai communities and rivers. Festival markets grew from patterns of regional trade and social exchange. Courtship games and antiphonal songs provided opportunities for young people to meet.

The combination of Buddhist ritual with indigenous social traditions transformed the Water-Splashing Festival from a primarily religious observance into a broad celebration of Dai culture.

In this sense, the festival became a living stage for water traditions, music and dance, food, clothing, religion, social relationships, and community identity.

Modern Era: After 1949

A particularly famous episode in the modern history of the festival occurred in April 1961, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai visited Xishuangbanna.

During his stay, Zhou took part in the Dai New Year celebrations and joined local people in splashing water.

Photographs and later retellings of the event became part of the public memory of the festival in modern China.

Chinese intangible-cultural-heritage accounts frequently highlight Zhou’s participation as an important moment in the festival’s growing national visibility. In subsequent decades, increasing numbers of visitors from other parts of China and overseas travelled to Xishuangbanna to experience the celebration.

The festival calendar also became increasingly standardised.

Traditionally, the Water-Splashing Festival was held around the middle of the sixth month of the Dai calendar, generally corresponding to the period around mid-April. Exact dates varied among regions according to local calendars and customs.

In Xishuangbanna, the period from 13 to 15 April was formally established as the principal annual festival period in local regulations in the late twentieth century, with later revisions further defining its status as a shared regional celebration.

Dehong likewise established an official festival holiday, although the calendrical arrangements differ from those of Xishuangbanna.

The formalisation of festival dates marked an important transition.

A celebration once organised mainly through customary and religious calendars had become part of the officially recognised cultural calendar of autonomous prefectures, allowing large-scale public events to be coordinated more consistently.

Contemporary Era: Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection

On 20 May 2006, the Dai Water-Splashing Festival submitted by Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, was included in the first national list of intangible cultural heritage of China.

In 2008, the Dai Water-Splashing Festival submitted by Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture was included through the subsequent national heritage listing process.

These recognitions placed the festival within China’s formal system for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.

Today, the Water-Splashing Festival is among the most prominent traditional celebrations in Xishuangbanna and Dehong.

Its programmes commonly combine folk rituals, Buddhist observances, music and dance, public performances, tourism, cultural exhibitions, and commercial exchange.

Traditional artistic forms—including Zhangha singing, elephant-related dance traditions, and other local performance arts—are often presented during the festival, providing visitors with a broader introduction to Dai cultural heritage.

The festival has also increasingly become a celebration shared by multiple ethnic communities living in Xishuangbanna and surrounding regions.

At the same time, its cultural significance extends beyond China’s borders.

Mid-April New Year festivals featuring ritual bathing and water splashing are also celebrated in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and other parts of mainland Southeast Asia. Although the traditions of each country and ethnic group have their own histories, names, rituals, and religious contexts, they form part of a wider regional cultural sphere shaped by Theravada Buddhism, Indic calendars, seasonal transition, and the symbolism of water.

The Dai Water-Splashing Festival therefore serves as an important cultural bridge between southwestern China and mainland Southeast Asia.

Modern tourism has transformed its scale dramatically. Large celebrations in Xishuangbanna and Dehong can attract very large numbers of domestic and international visitors.

For many outsiders, the spectacular mass water fights are now the festival’s most visible feature. Yet behind the public carnival lies a much older ritual structure centred on New Year renewal, Buddhist devotion, community bonds, and reverence for water.

The festival’s history can therefore be understood as a long transformation:

from ritual purification to communal blessing, from monastery observance to public celebration, and from a regional ethnic tradition to an internationally recognised cultural festival.

The Water-Splashing Festival reflects the convergence of several cultural traditions: distant water-splashing customs associated in some historical interpretations with Persia and Central Asia; South Asian religious traditions of purification and ritual bathing; and the indigenous water culture and rice-farming civilisation of the Dai people.

In its mature Dai form, however, these influences are no longer separate layers. They have become part of a single cultural system organised around water, Buddhism, and community.

Water

Water is the central cultural symbol of the Water-Splashing Festival.

In Dai culture, water is associated with good fortune, happiness, health, fertility, purification, and renewal.

To splash someone with clean water is therefore not simply to make them wet. Traditionally, it is to offer a blessing.

The water symbolically washes away the misfortunes and impurities of the old year and welcomes a new beginning.

This meaning also reflects the ecological foundation of Dai society. In a civilisation historically dependent on wet-rice agriculture, rainfall determines crops, rivers sustain settlements, and water supports everyday life.

The symbolic power of water in the festival is therefore both religious and practical.

Buddhism

The Water-Splashing Festival is also closely associated with Buddhist ritual.

Buddha bathing, chanting, merit-making, offerings to monasteries, and other religious observances remain important elements of the New Year season in many Dai communities.

The ritual of pouring pure water over Buddha images expresses reverence and purification.

Through the historical spread of Theravada Buddhism, this religious symbolism became integrated with the Dai New Year and with older local ideas about water and agricultural renewal.

The result was not simply the preservation of an imported Buddhist ceremony, but the creation of a distinctly Dai cultural tradition.

People and Community

The continuing vitality of the Water-Splashing Festival ultimately depends on the communities that celebrate it.

Its history has unfolded not only in monasteries and ritual texts but also in villages, families, markets, streets, fields, rivers, and public squares.

The festival brings people together.

Families prepare for the New Year. Communities visit temples. Young people gather for games, singing, and dancing. Neighbours exchange blessings. Visitors are welcomed into the celebration.

Modern public events may involve enormous crowds, but the underlying social principle remains remarkably consistent: the festival is a renewal of relationships among people.

The well-known image of Premier Zhou Enlai joining local residents in the 1961 celebrations and the participation of large numbers of visitors today represent very different historical moments, yet both demonstrate the festival’s capacity to transform water into a language of shared goodwill.

The history of the Water-Splashing Festival reflects a long process of cultural transmission and transformation. Some interpretations trace distant antecedents to ancient water-splashing customs associated with Persia and Central Asia, while its more direct ritual foundations lie in South Asian traditions of purification and Buddha bathing. These traditions later spread through the Theravada Buddhist world of mainland Southeast Asia before reaching the Dai regions of Yunnan.

Within Dai society, they became integrated with an indigenous culture already deeply connected with water, monsoon rainfall, and wet-rice agriculture. From roughly the late twelfth century onward, Buddhist rituals, Dai New Year traditions, agricultural customs, and community practices gradually combined to shape the festival in its recognisable form.

After centuries of transmission, the festival entered a new stage of cultural safeguarding when it was included in China’s national intangible cultural heritage system in 2006. Today, it serves as an important expression of Dai culture, bringing together water traditions, Buddhist belief, music, dance, foodways, clothing, and community life.

Its development also illustrates a broader feature of cultural history: living traditions do not necessarily survive by remaining unchanged, but often by absorbing new influences and giving them local meaning. The Water-Splashing Festival is a striking example of this process, in which religious, calendrical, and agricultural traditions from different cultural spheres gradually merged into a Dai celebration of renewal, blessing, and community.

Along the Lancang River and throughout the Dai cultural region, water therefore retains its central symbolic meaning: it washes away the old year, carries blessings, and welcomes the new.

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