Taipei and Pingxi Lantern Festivals

A few weekends ago, we went up to Taipei for the Lantern Festival. Just like Kaohsiung had its lantern display along the Love River, Taipei also had a huge display at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Every year, the Lantern Festival falls on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year (this year on February 28th), bringing the Chinese New Year two-week holiday to a close. The lantern displays are kept up for another week of viewing, so we went the final weekend on March 5-7. Our plan was to go downtown Friday night to see the Taipei lanterns, and then go to Pingxi on Saturday to watch the sky lanterns (平溪天燈) be released.

Friday afternoon, Kristin, Bekah, Katherine and I took the HSR up to Taipei, where we met up with Kim at the station. While Kristin went to visit her aunt and Bekah took off for swing dancing, the other three of us went downtown to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall to meet Annie (a Fulbright junior scholar researching the Avian bird flu). The place was packed! Not quite as bad as during the New Year celebrations at Taipei 101, but still very crowded. The lantern display featured massive tiger and floral arrangements (I think in acknowledgment of the International Flower Expo in Taipei later this year). While the Kaohsiung lanterns were roughly the size of a large couch or bed, the Taipei lanterns were more on the scale of large sheds or small houses. The size and intricate detail of each lantern was impressive. My favorite part, however, might have been the English translations for the names and descriptions of each lantern. On one side of the hall, there was a whole sections of lanterns devoted to different countries from around the world. We could not really determine what the criteria was for why which countries were chosen - obvious countries like Taiwan and China, alongside predictable Asian neighbors like Malaysia and the Philippines, with odd European choices such as The Netherlands and Greece (but no France or Germany), and several countries none of us had ever even heard of before (we assumed they must have been tiny Pacific islands... four Fulbrighters fail at geography...). There was also a giant tiger lantern in front of Taipei 101, rotating in circles and bathed in colorful laser lights.










Left: Awesome winged tiger with caption "Everything as your wish is like the tiger with wings."
Right: Most intimidating Sponge Bob ever.











After walking around the lanterns for a few hours, Annie took us to a night market near Shida University where we joined up with Deborah and Jessica (Yilan ETAs) for shaved ice and some late-night shopping. Visiting Taipei is always fun, because there are so many other Fulbrighters to find and hang out with. There are only 12 of us down south, so I think we often forget about the other 30+ people up north. Bekah even got to bump into one unexpectedly while swing dancing.

The next day, we went to the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival (after an odd morning of touring the Taipei Miniatures Museum - not something I would recommend to others...). Pingxi is a small village just outside of Taipei up in the mountains, and hosts one of the largest lantern festivals in all of Taiwan every year. When we arrived in the afternoon, the street fair was already spilling over with people, buying fried food and fresh fruit juices while shopping for tiny collectibles and souvenir lanterns (I may or may not have bought six tiny and two large ones... They were just so pretty!). As the sky darkened, people began releasing huge paper lanterns. These lanterns are made out of colorful paper, each color signifying a different meaning such as luck, love or wealth. People paint their wishes and dreams on them, releasing them into the sky. I love the poetry of the idea - sending our hopes and prayers up into heaven.** You must think of it in a metaphorical sense; dreams are transitory and ephemeral, with us for a moment and then gone, released into a space of time we cannot follow or find again. But they are lodged with God, who knows all things and who understands our deepest desires and most secret fears and joys.











Starting at 6:30pm and occurring again every thirty minutes or so from out front of a local school, there were scheduled releases of a hundred lanterns at a time. Of course, one could set off lanterns from anywhere along the street. One of the best places was on top of the railroad tracks, which ran along a ridge overlooking the main part of town, giving beautiful views of the sky. The entertaining part came every time a train passed by, as people had to grab their lanterns and jump out of the way. The whole festival had a very joyous air, as everyone would clap and cheer for each new lantern set off, no matter how many had gone up before or would go up later.

We decided to join in the tradition, so all bought our own lanterns to paint. Bekah and I got a red one (when in Asia, one must do red :) ), and decorated it with our wishes and extremely talented drawings of tigers and stick figures. We did not join in on one of the big releases, but sent ours up a ways down the road. When lighting the lantern, we had to stand on the edges to hold it down until the heat from the flame filled it, causing it to gently float into the sky. Luckily, we sent off our lanterns early in the evening, around 7pm. The night quickly deteriorated into sporadic rain and gusty winds. We saw many failed lanterns, which were blown into trees or buildings on the way up, causing them to catch on fire. One lantern was whipped against a telephone line, going up in flames before dropping to the ground and nearly burning the shrieking crowd beneath. Strong winds and paper lanterns do not mix well.



The hardest part of the evening was trying to get home. Since Pingxi is quite remote, the best way to get in and out is by bus. The city ran free buses for people from the Taipei Zoo metro stop out to Pingxi and back all day and night; but even with buses running every couple of minutes, we had to wait in line for close to forty minutes to get standing spots on the hour-long bus back to Taipei.


** Do not try to over-analyze the idea of sky lanterns: my father's first response was to criticize the theology, and Bekah could not help but ponder the many negatives for the environment of sending up thousands upon thousands of paper lanterns which must land and litter somewhere. Though, I went and looked this up, and the government actually pays the locals to go into the mountains afterwards to clean up the area. The surrounding area is very impoverished (tourism from the Sky Lantern Festival brings in enough revenue to support the village the entire year), and the lantern clean-up is an important source of income for the locals.