- Ready?

Go.

That's one.

And then raise your hands up, okay?

So, that's rule one.

Attention.

Go.

(calm music) (water splashing) One.

Two.

Three.

- Keep it up.

(calm music) (water splashing) - A dragon boat is a traditional boat.

They have the dragon head and tail as you see here.

And also that most interestingly is the drum.

As far as I know, no other race boat they have the drum as one of the features.

(calm music) (drum thudding) So, rather than just very quietly load the boat, we have the drum hit the rhythm so it make a lot of drama and also it's one of the way to excite the crew.

Dragon boats are very, very popular in China.

Almost everybody from the town, they line up around the river, so we hope to achieve similar thing in here to fully utilize our river and make it the real River City.

(calm music) - I think what this does for Peoria is just heightens again, just the various diverse cultural aspects that I think we have and what we own in Peoria.

- We have this river we call River City Peoria, but we don't have a lot of activity in the river so the dragon boat would be one of the thing to start a activity in the river.

(calm music) (calm music continues) The dragon boat starting many thousand years ago, when one of the Chinese local, he's very disappointed at how the government treat the normal people.

He commit suicide by jumping through the river, so the local people heard about it, they rushed to try to rescue him and then everybody peddle the boat, tried to rescue him, and that's the starting of the dragon boat.

- Well, it all started with a small group of people that we have some motivation to do something here since we have river, right?

We like the river.

So, it started in one launch, say, "Okay, we gotta just do something interesting."

We started with a little group here and then we get a boat and eventually we think, "Okay, this is like a club.

This is like a organization."

Bigger ones, we need a lot of help from different communities.

So, it's really more than just a purely Chinese course association and more than just ourself, it's pretty much the city.

- It's very important to celebrate diversity but then also be very inclusive of that diversity, inviting others from other walks of life to participate in your culture and that's what they've been doing.

- We're excited to have a partnership with the Peoria Chinese Association and kind of bringing to fruition a great way to highlight their culture here in the River City.

- Actually, in our member here, there are a lot of people are non-Chinese.

Actually, anybody in Peoria, the reason is, the first one is we want everybody in the Peoria community to enjoy this new introduction, new activity.

Secondly, we get a lot of support from the city, so we want the test dollar get back to the community.

(water splashing) (drums thudding) - I think it's very important to come out here and just open your horizon so, you know, you come down here and you'll see there's multiple boats and they've got different groups so when I attended a couple of weeks ago, there was one that was staffed by the fire department, which I think was very cool, as well as just other representation from other community groups.

- And we took a step back and assessed what this was.

It was a good way to compliment other events that are happening on both sides of the river and particularly on the Peoria side with the riverfront market or other large scale events that find their way downtown.

- We want to attract as many people from the community participation as possible.

Secondly, we want to increase the tourism and also the utilization of the riverfront because the dragon boat.

So, hopefully people come visit Peoria because we have the dragon boat, they watch our race, our performance in the riverfront.

- I'm hoping that we can have more people join in and make some events happening in the city in the future.

This can really be a lot of interesting people here in this city and I love this and hopefully everybody love the boat, love the sports.

- Learn that there's multiple walks of life that have come to the table for making this, you know, come to fruition.

The teachers, restaurant owners, engineers, professors, whatever their daily life is, you know, they also have this love for Peoria that comes by living and playing here.

- This culture developed in China over a thousand years.

It's good for bringing a lot of diversity and people can enjoy it.

(upbeat music)