Taiwan Lantern Festival: Fire and Light

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Lantern Festival is one of the main Chinese holidays; at this time, the entire Celestial Empire on the face of our planet becomes much brighter. We have already written about how this riot of lights and fireworks takes place in mainland China; meanwhile, the rich and beautiful island of Taiwan, perhaps, celebrates the lantern festival brightest of all.

Unlike the rest of China, which celebrates its lanterns in mid-January, Taiwanese do so in early February, closer to the national New Year. If earlier the celebrations took place mainly in Chiang Kai-shek Park in the main city of Taiwan, Taipei, now they cover the entire island.

Nowhere else on earth did people like holiday rockets, crackers and fireworks - but in China they already loved them because they invented them. Now, when not a single major holiday is complete without fireworks, and everyone is crazy about fireworks, the Chinese love them even more so. After a night of fireworks, Taiwan's main buildings, all in a puff of gunpowder and puffs of smoke, look like they've survived World War III.

The addressee of all these explosions and bursts of heavenly fire is the famous Chinese hero of antiquity - Guan Yu. But this does not prevent everyone present from enjoying themselves - and there are many, many thousands of them. This happens in the Pingxi temple in the middle of Taipei - there, as the legend says, the watchmen lit fires in ancient times to announce to the villagers who were hiding from the robbers in the mountains: the bandits are gone, you can return home.

And again, red is everywhere - the lanterns themselves, and gold - the color of fiery sparks, accentuated by the darkness of the still winter sky. The holiday lasts from six in the evening to five in the morning - and all this time it is difficult to close your eyes, because the sky constantly surprises with new surprises, fireworks. Nearby is a huge luminous lantern in the shape of a Rabbit. And the thousands and thousands of lanterns that the Taiwanese hold in their hands, if you look from above, and themselves are so similar to the starry sky, as if they see double in their eyes.