Nearly 10,000 people yesterday gathered at a beach in Kaohsiung’s Cieding District (茄萣) to watch the burning of a “King Boat” in a local religious ritual to protect the community and its fishers.
The ritual was organized by the local Wanfu Temple (萬福宮) to pray for peace and prosperity and prevent a plague or other catastrophes.
It had been 18 years since the temple, where five deities are worshiped, built its last King Boat, the temple said, adding that an effigy of the “god of plague” were on board of the ship burnt yesterday.
Photo: CNA
The temple has since 1960 organized nine King Boat burnings, each time with the approval of the deities known as the Wangyeh (王爺, or Royal Lords), obtained by tossing divination blocks, it said.
Worshipers began gathering at Wanfu Temple before dawn yesterday to prepare for the departure of the boat featuring colorful paintings of religious scenes. The temple spent NT$5 million (US$175,562) to build the almost 19m-long ship, it said.
At about 7am, the boat was moved to the Cieding seashore, about 1km from the temple, and placed on a large pile of ghost money and traditional offerings from worshipers. The King Boat was set ablaze at 10:20am.
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
An elderly fisher surnamed Huang (黃) recalled participating in 2002’s King Boat burning, saying that blessed by the ceremony, two local fishing vessels, on one of which he worked at the time, caught 90,000 mullets on a single day after the burning.
Peace and good catches are the main concerns of local fishers, he said, stressing the importance of the rituals.
“This is why we take these ceremonies seriously and ask the gods for their blessings,” he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater