"Lynch’s Spiderman" dragon boat team waits to compete last year on the Blackstone River.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

The Pawtucket Arts Festival is a decade old this year and has grown from small beginnings to become a multi-faceted event of music and dance, culture and cuisine that stretches over three consecutive weekends.

Much of its popularity can be attributed to paddling: the dragon boat races

There were no races the first year of the festival. Then Sunny Ng and Louis Yip proposed the addition. The two men are business partners, Pawtucket residents and immigrants from Hong Kong.

“We think it’s a fun thing,” Ng says. “We wanted to introduce it to our friends here.”

Ng and Yip met with Bob Billington, president of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council, which now runs the races as part of the festival’s Taiwan Day Festival.

“I had no idea what a Chinese dragon boat was,” Billington says. “But I thought it was interesting.”

Others thought it was interesting, too. But the interest, or awareness, wasn’t immediate. There was only a month between Ng’s and Yip’s purchase of two 38-foot wooden dragon boats from China and the debut of those boats at the second annual Pawtucket Arts Festival.

A small group of people went to the Pawtucket River to not merely see the boats, but to see people paddling in them, which was an issue.

“I made members of the Pawtucket highway department get into the boats,” Billington says. “We couldn’t get these boats from Hong Kong and not race them. So we just drafted people.”

This year, about three dozen teams, with 23 people per team, are expected to compete in the event, which can draw as many as 20,000 spectators to the banks of the Pawtucket River. There are three race divisions — expert, intermediate and novice — where each winner receives $1,000.

Teams come from all over the Northeast.

“We have the lure of prize money,” Billington says. “Money is always a good motivator.”

The original boats used in the festival’s races have been retired. The festival now uses six 55-foot long fiberglass boats donated to the festival by the Taiwan government, which is a festival supporter.

“I do think this is very good for Taiwanese culture and for the local people,” says Jason Yuan, senior press officer of the Taipei Economic Cultural Office in Boston, which serves all of New England. “There are a lot of Taiwanese there who support it.”

There are reportedly 15,000 people of Chinese ancestry in Rhode Island. And the epicenter of the culture is Pawtucket, home of the Rhode Island Association of Chinese Americans and the Rhode Island Christian Church.

“Pawtucket has become the center for the Chinese community,” Ng says. “Our community is all involved. It’s a big gathering for us.”

For those who haven’t seen a dragon race, a regatta it’s not.

Teams race against the clock and each other, strenuously paddling to the beat of an on-board drummer.

“When I did the dragon boat, I tried to get the drummer position so I didn’t have to row,” Herb Weiss, Pawtucket’s economic and cultural affairs officer, recalls. “It is very demanding. I was crazy not to have a life insurance policy.”

Though relatively new to Pawtucket, dragon-boat racing is thousands of years old. According to Chinese legend, the sport began when fourth-century Chinese poet Ch’u Yuan drowned himself in the Mi Lo river after losing favor with the king of Chu, one of many warring states in China.

The people of Chu, the story goes, were so grieved by Yuan’s death they raced around the river in fishing boats, splashing their oars and beating their drums to scare water dragons away from Yuan’s body.

The races in Pawtucket are quite a festive spectacle. The boats are elaborately painted with dragon heads and tails. Some teams wear costumes. And an announcer encourages exuberance from the shoreline crowd.

The year after the dragon-boat race was introduced to the festival, so was Chinese music and food. And the Taiwan Day Festival was formed.

There will be lion dancing, arts and crafts, and live music. The featured band is Chai Found Music, a six-member group on a one-month North American tour.

“It’s traditional Chinese music,” Yuan, of the Taipei Economic Cultural Office, says. “But they do it in a rock ’n’ roll way. You don’t just sit down and play. There will be more movement.”

New to this year’s festival will a Chinese dumpling eating contest, which the people at the Taipei Economic Cultural Office proposed.

“We said ‘we’ve got to do it,’ ” Billington says. “It’s so us: different and a little bit quirky.”

The world record for dumpling eating, according to the International Federation of Competitive Eating, is 91 dumplings in eight minutes. The Pawtucket contest, which has a men’s and women’s division, is Saturday at 12:30 p.m. The entry fee is $10, which some regard as quite a value.

“The contest is at lunch time,” Yuan says. “You have to find something to eat. Even if you don’t win, you have dumplings to eat.”

The Pawtucket Arts Festival officially kicks off tomorrow night with its opening gala. And as with the dragon-boat races, it, too, has grown greatly in popularity.

A decade ago, 35 people attended the festival’s inaugural gala.

“It was like a potluck,” recalls Weiss, Pawtucket’s economic and cultural affairs officer. “People brought muffins. I got 60 pizzas donated by local pizza places. At the end of the evening, everyone left the gala with a pizza or two.”

Last year, more than 2,000 people attended the opening gala, so many that the grounds of Slater Mill Historic Site couldn’t contain them and they spilled out on to Roosevelt Avenue, which this year will be closed to vehicular traffic.

“We had to look at our space requirements,” Weiss says. “With good food and great music, you’re going to attract a crowd, hopefully.”

brourke@projo.com