The main lantern at next year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival is to be a 26m-tall installation in the shape of the Monkey King, or Sun Wukong, one of the main characters in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
The Monkey King-shaped lantern is to be the tallest main lantern ever created for the annual event, which has been hosted by the bureau since 1990.
Next year’s festival is to be held in the plaza in front of the Taiwan High Speed Rail’s Taoyuan Station from Feb. 22 to March 6.
Photo: CNA
Sun Wukong was chosen because next year is the Year of the Monkey in the Chinese zodiac.
The character also represents courage and intelligence, the bureau said.
In the 16th-century novel, Sun Wukong is born from a stone and acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices and it has the ability to shrink or expand to the whim of its wielder.
After being tamed by the Buddha, the monkey accompanies a monk, Hsuan-tsang (玄奘), on a journey from China to India to retrieve Buddhist sutras.
In 1942, Briton Arthur Waley, a prominent translator of Chinese and Japanese literature, published an abridged version of some of the chapters of Journey to the West as a novel, titled Monkey, which made the character well-known in Western nations.
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