Taiwan began to celebrate the Lantern Festival on Friday, with cities and counties illuminated with lights and fireworks in a series of events that are set to run through the middle of next month.
The Taipei Light Festival started at the Taipei Expo Park, featuring a golden goat-shaped lantern to celebrate the Year of the Sheep, which can also be translated from the Chinese as “goat.”
Visitors can enjoy not only the 12.5m-tall main display, but music and light shows staged every 30 minutes from 7pm through 11pm during the festival, which ends on March 8.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times.
The annual Taiwan Lantern Festival also began on Friday, held this year in Taichung at three different venues — in the city’s Wuri (烏日) and Fengyuan (豐原) districts and Taichung Park.
All three locations showcase lanterns made for the Year of the Sheep, with the main display in Wuri District, at 23.4m tall, scheduled to be launched on March 5.
In southern Taiwan, people in Yunlin County, Tainan and Kaohsiung are treated to the sights and sounds of their own respective lantern festivals.
In Tainan, the annual Yue Jin Lantern Festival in Yanshui (鹽水) District, expanded this year to feature 40 lanterns created by artisans from home and abroad, up from 24 last year. The lanterns are installed around a lake and historic alleyways and popular tourist sites as part of the festival that lasts until March 15.
In Kaohsiung, visitors can see laser shows on water screens and fireworks displays over the Love River. Fourteen artisan lanterns adorn areas along the landmark river and the city’s Central Park.
The 23-day 2015 Kaohsiung Lantern Festival is scheduled to run through March 15.
Hualien City is hosting a lantern festival on the east coast, dazzling visitors with light and water shows accompanied by music.
Traditional lanterns are arranged around the city and towns around Hualien County to light up main roads, railway stations and squares.
In Penghu County, fishermen in Shiyeu Township celebrate the Lantern Festival in their own unique way. On the Lantern Festival, fishermen take a day off and put up lanterns and lights on their boats at Wai-an Fishing Harbor, brightening the port with more than 1,000 lanterns and lights.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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