Let there be lanterns
Sharon Stephenson finds a trip to Taiwan proves equal parts surreal and a light-filled surprise.
You can imagine the pitch: let’s make some poor bloke in a motorbike helmet stand still while hundreds of firecrackers and rockets are fired at him.
It would never wash with New Zealand’s health and safety junta, but in late-19th century Taiwan, it was thought to be a good way to ward off evil and misfortune.
Our guide Danny tells us that the Yanshui Beehive Rocket Festival, an annual religious festival held on the 14th and 15th day of the Lunar New Year, started after deadly cholera and plague epidemics ravaged the townsfolk for two decades.
‘‘So the locals asked the martial god Guan Gong to help them by setting off thousands of fireworks,’’ says Danny. ‘‘In the end, sulphur in the fireworks killed the bacteria and the loud noise scared away the rats that carried the plague.’’
Emboldened by the success, this dance of disfigurement, which has been ranked the fifth most dangerous in the world, takes place every year in the southwestern city of Tainan.
We have no desire to lose an eye so instead we head north to Yunlin for a much less dangerous, but no less colourful, annual event, the Lantern Festival.
This is not to be confused with the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival, east of Taipei, where hundreds of paper lanterns, some as high as 10m, are scribbled with hopes, desires and dreams, before being released, sending the candle-lit messages arcing into a velvety black sky.
Instead, the Taiwan Lantern Festival features thousands of fixed electric sculptures and is the largest of the country’s many Lunar New Year festivals. It’s a movable feast and this year it was the turn of Yunlin, an agricultural region awash with tea plantations, 231 kilometres southwest of Taipei. Thanks to the superbly clean and embarrassingly efficient high speed train, we alight at Yunlin Station a shade over two hours after leaving Taiwan’s capital.
It’s the first time in the Lantern Festival’s 28-year history the festival has been held in Yunlin and the streets are heaving with excited locals. We wander dusty lanes where ancient eastern custom meets modern Asian sensibilities, where elaborately decorated Taoist temples share the same real estate as tiny shops flogging iPhones and garish Hello Kitty sweaters.
There’s also food. And lots of it. But then this is a nation where you can walk a few paces in any direction, pull up a plastic chair and fill your belly. The air is thick with the aromatic holy trinity of soy, spices and grilled meat, while tables loaded with freshly made dumplings and glossy roast duck tempt the hungry and the greedy.
We munch on charred corn-on-thecob (soft, buttery and liberally dusted with chilli powder) and far too many pineapple cakes, which don’t sound very Asian, but which Danny assures us are an iconic Taiwanese pastry. They’re like mini pies and come studded with candied pineapple and chewable bits of bitter melon encased in a crumbly, buttery pastry; they’re also dangerously addictive.
But we didn’t come to Yunlin just to eat our body weight in cake, so we bundle up against the unseasonably cold evening and drive across town to the Agricultural Expo Ecological Park, a 50-hectare area illuminated by so many LED lights it’s probably visible from space.
We’re here for the Lantern Festival’s opening night and although it’s still a good two hours until kick-off, hundreds are milling around, gawking at the record 11,000 lanterns which range from tiny Micky Mouse figurines to a 25m rooster (this being the Year of the Rooster, and all). Organisers later email me to say that about 100,000 people will pass through the gates over the next 10 days, making this the biggest Lantern Festival ever.
Armed with cups of scalding oolong tea, we watch dancers cavorting around a stage to what sounds suspiciously like a Taiwanese spin on a Justin Bieber song. More dancers take to the stage, some dressed in traditional garb, others who look as though they raided Disney’s wardrobe. We have no idea what’s going on but it’s fun and loud and helps to divert our attention from the cold.
Just past the teenagers burning incense under ‘‘no smoking’’ signs lie several football fields worth of lanterns. This year they’re grouped into three themes – friendliness to the earth, cultural diversity and indigenous Yunlin.
A huge red serpent hovers menacingly in the air, above bright yellow chickens and next to a roaring tiger. There’s even an illuminated Jesus, a surprise in this mainly Buddhist/Taoist/Confucianist nation. But it’s a riot of colour, fantasy and light. So much light in fact that my