Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival

Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

Every year, for ten days around the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, Taiwan holds a lantern festival. The origins of this are unclear; there are a number of theories about how it started, many full of gods and legends, so I'm not even going to try to pick one. Let's just accept the festival exists, and not worry about why.

Part of the festival is the huge lanterns that we showed in our last post 'Taipei - more sightseeing'. They are certainly amazing, and well worth seeing, but what we were really interested in was the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival.

Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

Sky lanterns are the beautiful, if contentious (due to potential fire risks and environmental concerns), paper lanterns that you light a wick at the bottom and they float up into the sky. They are believed to have been started by Chu-ko Liang, who was a highly skilled military strategist to Liu Bei (founder of China's Shu Han Dynasty, 221-264 AD), during the turbulent era of Three Kingdoms. He was also known as Kong Ming, meaning 'Hidden Dragon' to represent that he was able to achieve great things that people did not expect of him.



Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

Chu-ko Liang is said to have used smaller sky lanterns as a means of communicating military intelligence, so some call them Kong Ming lanterns. Others use the same name, but because they are the same shape as the hats that he is depicted as wearing.

Anyway, these days, on the fifteenth day itself, thousands of these lanterns are released, which truly is a sight to see.

And we nearly missed it!
Firstly, we went to the wrong place! It is called the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival, so we went to Pingxi. We had to take a train from Taipei to Ruifang, and then change trains to go on to Pingxi. However they kicked us off at a place called Shifen, and we had to find another train going to Pingxi. We got there, eventually, and decided to have a little wander around the village before finding the festival area.



Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

Thankfully, there wasn't much village to see, so it wasn't long before we started to look for where we were supposed to go, but we couldn't find it. We asked someone, who didn't speak any English, but seemed to be telling us it wasn't here. Hmmm, let's not panic yet, we probably just misunderstood.

We then managed to find someone who did speak English, and sure enough we were in the wrong place. She told us to get on a bus, which was laid on specially for the festival, and it would take us to the right place. We found the bus, still a bit unsure whether we were doing the right thing, and it took us right back to Shifen, where we had been kicked off the train in the first place.

Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

As it turns out, the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival is actually in Shifen!
So, now we were in the right place, and we were happily wandering along the train tracks - yes, that's right, this all happens along the tracks and we just get out of the way when a train comes - watching people buy a lantern, write their wishes on it, and send it up.




We decided to do one too. The lanterns come in a variety of colours, which symbolise different things like yellow or orange for wealth, pinks for love, marriage and family, and blue and green for careers. We chose red, which stands for health and peace. We wrote on our messages, and then they helped us light and launch it, taking a few photos first.



Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

So, our own lantern done, and it now getting quite dark, we started wondering why we couldn't see the expected swathes of mass releases; all we were seeing was individuals releasing their own. There were a lot, but it wasn't what we had expected.
We decided to take a walk further along the tracks, and suddenly, just as we were thinking that we were going nowhere and should turn back, we saw a load of lanterns in the sky nearby, and went haring off to find the source. We had to be quick, because our only way back was by train, and we didn't have that long before the last one goes.



Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

As we hurried along, we came across a family, who were also rushing along. They started indicating to us to hurry, and gave us a piece of paper that looked a bit like a ticket. At this stage, we figured it did no harm to follow, but we thought the ticket was to get in to the live entertainment that was going on at the stage by the release site, and we knew we didn't have time for that.


Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

When we got to the release area, the family showed their tickets and ushered us through too. They then disappeared, but we realised that we were now standing in a group waiting to have an opportunity to go on stage to release one of the big lanterns ourselves - the family obviously had a couple of spares, and gave them to us - how nice of them!



Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

It would have been great to have been a part of one of the releases, but sadly it was evident that our turn was not going to come for a while, and we didn't have time to do it and then get our train back. Had we known an alternative way back to Taipei, we would probably have waited and done it, but we didn't, so we had to go.

Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei

We did have a chance to watch two of the releases at close quarters though, and it really was a lovely sight.

Pingxi Lantern Festival, Taipei