By Zhu Shanshan

China's Dragon Boat Festival was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list Wednesday along with 21 other Chinese cultural heritages.

With 22 cultural heritages including calligraphy and paper-cutting inscribed onto the UNESCO list, China ranked the first this year in terms of the intangible cultural heritages nodded by the UN body, which approved a total of 76 world cultural treasures for listing at its recent meeting in Abu Dhabi.

China's application for inscription of the Dragon Boat Festival onto UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List came four years after South Korea registered Gangneung Danoje Festival in 2005, which ignited a heated debate over the festival's origin.

Authorities in Hubei Province, where the Duanwu (Dragon Boat) Festival customs originated, submitted an application in May to UNESCO for the Intangible Culture Heritage tag.

Different from South Korea's, China's application included four parts – the tradition of old rites which originated in Zigui county in Hubei, the hometown of poet Qu Yuan, the boat race in Huangshi city in Hubei, the Miluo riverbank customs, and the customs in Suzhou of the Jiangsu Province, according to Intangible Culture Heritage Protection Center of Hubei Province.

"The result proves that the Chinese culture has got recognition around the world and it will make Chinese pay more attention to protect and promote their traditional culture," said Lu Jun, the head of a society of Chinese culture.

"It's more pathetic that a nation doesn't realize the importance of its culture than it doesn't have any. It's a wise move to list it as an intangible cultural heritage which could help people around the world know the Chinese culture better," said Zhu Aiqin, a postgraduate at Peking University.

The festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month on the Chinese lunar calendar, became a national holiday for the first time last year.

Originated more than 2,500 years ago to commemorate patriotic poet Qu Yuan (278BC – 340BC) in the Warring States period, the Dragon Boat Festival has been celebrated annually in China.

People eat Zongzi, a pyramid-shaped dumpling made of glutinous rice and wrapped in reed leaves, and watch dragon boat race.