The Tourism Bureau yesterday unveiled the designs of the main lantern and the hand-held lanterns that will be used during the Taiwan Lantern Festival in Tainan next month.
The main lantern features the spinous country rat (
Weighing 25 tonnes, the rat lantern, with a gold ingot in its hand, was mounted on a 3m-tall pedestal. Designers also used state-of-the-art technology, including optics diffuser films and holography, to give the lantern a brighter shine.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
The hand-held lanterns are a paper mache design known as Vital Rat (
Hung Hsin-fu (
"The lantern is meant to represent Taiwan's vitality and health," he said.
Event organizers have produced 120,000 hand-held lanterns to be distributed to participants.
The festival will begin on Feb. 21 and end on March 2.
Bureau Director-General Janice Lai (
She said the Discovery Channel would visit Taiwan this year to cover the event. Aside from the festival, the channel also intends to film other local events, including hot-air lanterns in Taipei County's Pingsi Township (平溪), beehive firecrackers in Tainan County's Yenshui Township (鹽水) and the "Han Dan" festivities (炸寒單) in Taitung County.
In the annual event, a person dresses up as Han Dan, a God worshipped locally, and allow others to fire firecrackers at him or her.
Tainan County Commissioner Su Huan-chih (
Solar City is located between Hsinshih (新市) and Shanhua (善化) townships and features a community powered entirely by solar energy.
Visitors to the festival can come via the Sun Yat-sen Freeway or the Formosa Freeway, he said.
Su said the county government had built three connecting roads to facilitate the transportation of tourists and also built a 30-hectare parking lot.
A temporary train service will also be available.
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