Looking back on a quarter-century of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival

The Colorado Dragon Boat Festival will open its 2026 weekend on Saturday, Aug. 29, at Sloan’s Lake, where it’s been held since 2001. That first festival was a one-day affair with 16 teams competing, five food vendors and a performing arts stage that drew 16,000 attendees, twice the number organizers expected for a new event introducing a sport new to Denver. This year, the festival expects 180,000 spectators to what has become the largest dragon boat festival in the country.

Sara Moore, the executive director of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, is excited to helm her eighth CDBF. She’s shepherded the pan-Asian community celebration through some unique challenges, including hosting a “virtual” version during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with performers showing videos online, and canceling in 2021 because of algae in Sloan’s Lake. That year, though, CDBF held its first Regatta races in Adams County because the water there was clear.

The dragon boat races are still the big draw, but the festival continues to spotlight the culture of the area’s many Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities.

“When it comes to new things, we are really just getting bigger and better, with quite a few opportunities for everybody, for the whole family to come and join,” Moore promises. 

From its early days, CDBF was envisioned to be much more than another event for Denver’s sport-crazed fans. Dragon boat racing is the main event, of course, but CDBF was started as a way to introduce Denver residents to the variety and history of AANHPI communities, including the almost 40 Asian ethnicities in Colorado, and the equally diverse cultures of these communities, including performances and cuisines.

Over the years, organizers would seek out lesser-known communities such as the Hmong or Nepali to feature in their own tent exhibits and performances. Food vendors have included the debuts of Filipino and Hmong culinary traditions. One Thai vendor used to clang a bell and yell “Monkey Balls!” every time someone bought one of his meatball beef or pork skewers.

That first year, because the festival was still unknown, few food vendors stepped up. Out of the five food tents, the festival had a Mexican restaurant that knew one of the organizers and offered to help serve food. Because the attendance turned out to be double the expected number, every food vendor ran out by the afternoon. That helped the festival’s reputation, and by the next year, more restaurants were on hand.  

The number of race teams grew too, as well as groups willing to perform to share their communities’ cultures. Denver Taiko was on hand from the first year and will perform again (the group is hosting its 50^th anniversary concert on Saturday, Aug. 29, at School of Mines and will play CDBF on Sunday). South Asian dance group Mudra Dance Studio has been a regular every summer since 2002 on the main performing arts stage.

Every AANHPI organization has been able to display information about their mission, and many Asian community shops that can be found in ethnic neighborhoods like Little Saigon Business District along South Federal have been part of the festival.

This year, the Taste of Asia food courts at the festival will keep people fed and hydrated with more than 30 vendors, including food trucks.

Over 40 teams will compete on 16 boats that CDBF now owns instead of renting for each festival. That first year, the winners were the Mongolian team, a shock considering Mongolia – like Colorado – is landlocked and not known for its swimming or boating culture. They beat out the Denver Police Department’s race team for the honor. 

Moore notes that CDBF has evolved beyond the festival itself, and now includes an annual Dragon Boat Regatta and Night Market at the Riverdale Regional Park in Adams County (that event will be Sept. 26). The Regatta was launched in 2021, and the Night Market debuted last year. “They’re such an amazing supporter and partner,” Moore says of Adams County. “They’ve been doing quite a bit for us, so we’re we’re gonna stay, and we’re gonna hopefully get bigger and bigger there.” CDBF’s boats are also stored by Adams County.

Roots and branches 

This constant evolution is something CDBF has gone through since its start. It was originally planned by three people: Ding Wen Hsu, Howie Solow and John Chin. Chin and Solow were friends through the Chinese community – Solow is a Shifu, or master, of Shaolin Hung Mei Kung Fu school in Boulder and has been leading his students in lion dances throughout the area, as well as performing dragon dances for CDBF’s opening ceremony. 

Hsu, who was involved in a Chinese community organization, was frustrated that people in Denver didn’t know very much about the community’s culture. But she heard that John Chin, whom she met through the Organization of Chinese Americans, was thinking about creating a Chinese festival with his friend who taught kung fu. 

“That’s when I started thinking about how maybe we can do something other than just for Chinese, because we have such a small Asian community in Denver. We needed to get more Asians involved rather than just the Chinese,” she says. “So I contacted John and said, ‘You know, I heard that you guys are interested in putting together a festival in Denver. Can we talk, and then maybe we could collaborate?’”

That collaboration blossomed, bringing together a pan-Asian community with the general public. Chin died from cancer in 2018, and Hsu officially left CDBF the same year, after guiding it through its early growth and then helping to organize the boat races.

CDBF’s growth eventually led to branches – like the regatta and night market – that are part of the program today.

Training tomorrow’s leaders 

In 2010, the CDBF board hired Erin Yoshimura, who had been a volunteer since the first year, managing the performing arts stage and opening ceremony, then project-managing the event through its first decade, as its executive director. Under her guidance, the festival became financially stable and attracted more and more attendees. 

In her time as executive director, she also launched an annual Asian film festival in 2016, which is now part of the Denver Film Society’s portfolio as the Colorado Dragon Boat Film Festival. 

She launched the Emerging Leaders program, the first leadership program designed for early-career AANHPI young men and women, which she ran because of her background in leadership and diversity training, in 2012. It still continues today, with Yoshimura as the trainer.

Yoshimura says she’s proud of the Emerging Leaders Program because of the impact it can have on future leaders in the AANHPI community. The idea of such a program was envisioned early on, she recalls, as part of the festival’s foundational missions. “We baked in leadership training as one of the goals,” she says.

Today, Moore acknowledges that ELP is still a foundation. “We’re really working to try and focus more on ELP, because it’s one of the most needed programs that we have,” she says. “I think a lot of people obviously just know us as Dragon Boat Festival because that’s our biggest, largest, most visible piece.  But we do so much behind the scenes that I think is equally, if not more important, especially the leadership program.” 

The ELP’s alumni attest to its importance in their career development. Elizabeth Franz, a mediator and mediation trainer, says ELP was perfect for her. 

“There’s a lot of generic leadership training out there, and I was happy to find something that was in a community that I’m a part of,” she says. “There was more trust there. I trusted the Dragon Boat Festival, and then, going through the program, just having something specific for the pan-Asian community, and then having other young Asian Americans in the cohort with me was important.”

The program, she adds, gave her a boost. “It gave me a lot more confidence, for sure. I felt more confident just because I knew I had the training, had the experience, but I also knew there were people that I could go to who would be honest with me if I was, like, in over my head.”

Rose Dang, a paralegal, was in the 2023 class of the program. “ELP was Asian therapy for me,” she says. “I learned so much about myself and leadership style, and it sparked my passion for activism and volunteer work.”

Mark your calendars for CDBF

The vendors in the festival’s Asian Marketplace have learned to place a lot of importance on the event over the years. The most striking example of this relationship is from Truong An, a gift shop in the Far East Center that can’t be at this year’s festival but has participated since 2001. It was a given for Mimi Luong Ye, her husband Michael, and the Luong family that they would be at CDBF every year. 

So much so that Mimi admits she planned a pregnancy around the festival.

“It’s very true,” she admits. “It’s because Dragon Boat Festival has been a part of our life for all those years, right? Like we were there from the beginning.” She was 18 when her family’s shop was recruited. 

Then she met and married Michael Ye, who has been the mastermind behind Truong An’s expansion into retail spaces at DIA as Boxtastic. In 2013, they realized they would like to have a child. So they planned around the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival.

Their son Landon was born May 25, she says, “and we literally planned it so that we know that July is the Dragon Boat Festival. So I would have a month of post-natal to care for Landon.”

During that festival, she recalls, “every few hours I would literally go to the car and pump my milk. I had like a cooler with lots of ice, and I would go do that every few hours. It was crazy. It was so crazy. It had always been on our mind that if we have a kid, it has to be before Dragon Boat, because otherwise I cannot miss Dragon Boat Festival.”

The Colorado Dragon Boat Festival is fortunate to have such passionate fans – and participants – turning out every summer to celebrate Denver’s diverse Asian communities.

The Colorado Dragon Boat Festival will be held Aug. 29-30 at Sloan’s Lake Park, 20^th Avenue and West Byron Place, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. Races start 8 a.m. both days. There will be free shuttles from the Auraria campus parking lots.

Editor’s note: Gil Asakawa was a volunteer for CDBF’s operations committee from 2001-2016 and is married to Erin Yoshimura, who was also a festival volunteer starting in 2001 until she was hired as the executive director from 2010-2016.