A loud call for plentiful rains
‘Dragons’ and ‘wizards’ fire up rocket festival in Myanmar
NANTAR (Myanmar): Clad in elaborate headdresses representing dragons and wizards, Myanmar’s ethnic Pa’O fire huge, homemade rockets into the sky – an annual call for plentiful rains and a chance for a windfall of cash.
The Pa’O are one of the largest of the country’s minority groups, numbering around 1.2 million people and living mainly in Shan state’s highlands.
They are overwhelmingly Buddhist but many intertwine animism with their faith, believing they descend from a she-dragon and a wizard with mystical powers, known as a “weiza”.
Twelve days after Myanmar’s new year celebrations, as temperatures rise to over 40°, Pa’O communities travel to Nantar village for the annual rocket competition.
“Calling the rain like this every year means we get bumper rice harvests,” co-organiser Rike Kham said at the Pwe Lu Phaing festival’s 144th edition.
People dress in their finest, donning dark tunics and trousers in mourning for the kingdom they lost to the Bamar (Burmese) nearly 1,000 years ago.
But their headwear make up for their sombre attire.
Many women opt for a traditional bright orange cloth, symbolising the dragon.
Others, like Nan Pyone Kha Cho, 21, choose a more modern approach, sporting turbans of scarlet, gold or silver.
Men wear rolled-up cloth of various hues on their heads in the image of the “weiza” as they parade singing and dancing into the village, holding aloft their homemade rockets.
In the past, these were crafted entirely from bamboo and would carry up to 40kg of explosives.
Now they are made with bamboo-wrapped metal, holding five different grades of gunpowder.
The rocket is laid in position, the trajectory carefully adjusted.
The team captain takes a drag from a cigarette then uses it to light the fuse, before clambering down the bamboo rungs as the rocket lifts off with a deafening roar.
They can land up to seven or eight kilometres away, creating craters 1.5m deep in the fields.
A team of “linesmen” note the landing positions so they can later be collected. Accidents are rare, says Rike Kham.
Aside from an unlucky water buffalo hit in 2016, nobody has been hurt since two people died 10 years ago after “badly mixing the gunpowder”.
Judged by distance, the villages behind the top three placed rockets each take a share of the pooled entry fees.
With 75 rockets in this year’s competition, the prize money amounts to some US$4,000 (RM16,530) – enough to upgrade a road, build a bridge or connect more homes to the grid.