Last Friday, the population of Pingsi (平溪), a rural farming district in New Taipei City, jumped from approximately 5,000 inhabitants to over 100,000. The grass field at Jingtong Elementary School was packed but there was no pushing or shoving. Festival-goers chatted and wrote their wishes on paper lanterns, ooh-ing and ah-ing and snapping pictures as they released their lanterns into the evening sky.
Tomorrow, the Pingsi Sky Lantern Festival (平溪天燈節) will hold its third, and final, installment to welcome the New Year. Although the festival has been a government-organized event for 17 years, the inhabitants of Pingsi have been releasing lanterns into the sky since the late Qing Dynasty.
Chen Kuo-chun (陳國君), the commissioner of the Tourism and Travel Department of New Taipei City, says Pingsi’s mountainous terrain made it hard to travel, so people would use the lanterns to communicate.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
“They were mostly used as signals, not for writing long messages,” Chen said. “For instance, if someone saw a thief, they would send a lantern in the sky to warn the neighboring village.”
Nowadays, as you may have guessed, the symbolism of the lanterns has become more commercial. The Tourism and Travel Department says that people started lining up last Friday to reserve lanterns at 7am. By 11am, they were all sold out.
So be sure to arrive in Pingsi early if you plan to attend tomorrow’s festival which will also mark the fifteenth and last day of Lunar New Year festivities. Like last Friday’s event, the lanterns will be released in eight rounds, although the first round of lanterns, which kicks off at 5:30pm, are reserved for locals living in the area and the second round is reserved for embassy and trade office staff. Alternatively, you may purchase your own lantern from one of the roadside stores for NT$150 and release it from anywhere you like — which actually seems more fun.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
THE MORE, THE MERRIER
However, part of the festival’s atmosphere is huddling together and watching hundreds of lanterns simultaneously float up and illuminate the night sky. As Wu Cheng-hung (吳承恆), who was there with his wife and two young children from Taipei for the third year in a row, said: “Taiwanese like to line up and cluster in groups — it is simply part of our culture.”
Wu added that if it wasn’t for his children, he and his wife probably wouldn’t bother writing a wish on a lantern, as is customary today.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
“But our kids enjoy the atmosphere here because they get to play in the creek, watch some live performances and watch their lanterns fly up into the sky. It can be sort of romantic for us too,” he said.
Wang Yi-chieh (王宜婕), a middle-aged street vendor had a slightly different opinion. “The traffic is bad and the streets are crowded with tourists,” she said in a harried manner while scrambling to serve the next customer.
“But we generally don’t mind them coming into Pingsi every year — we need the business,” Wang added.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
Money matters are one issue. As for environmental concerns, Chen says that the paper from the lanterns will naturally decompose. Furthermore, the New Taipei City government has instituted a policy where people will be paid NT$10 for each lantern they recycle.
“Locals are generally happy to recycle and they can make new lanterns this way,” Chen said.
Logistics-wise, cars are not allowed to drive up to Pingsi tomorrow, so it’s best to catch a shuttle bus from Muzha Station (木柵站). Buses will say Pingsi Sky Lantern Festival (平溪天燈節) on the dashboard.
Plan for a bit of a hassle in getting there, but it’s worth the trek, especially if your New Year’s resolutions are not working out well and you want a second chance to make a wish.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and