At this festival, people wear helmets. The spectators, that is. The Lantern Festival, the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. In the streets of Yanshui,…
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At this festival, people wear helmets. The spectators, that is.
The Lantern Festival, the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. In the streets of Yanshui, racks packed tight with rocket fireworks are set alight, launching in every direction. They fly horizontally, straight toward where people stand. One is not meant to flee them — one is meant to walk into them.
It began with sickness.
When plague swept through, the god of the temple was carried out into the streets, and along the procession's path, firecrackers were set off without pause. The disease subsided, and so it became a yearly rite.
Sickness is something unseen. Against the unseen, fear can only answer with sound and with light. The scale of this festival is the scale of the fear people once felt.
On the northern coast stands Nankunshen Daitian Temple. The deity enshrined there is Wangye. Once feared as a bringer of plague, a spirit to be sent away, he gradually became instead a guardian, a protector.
Four hundred years of Tainan's history have been a relationship with the sea, with power, and with disease. Two of these have already faded from sight.
What remains is only the custom of lighting the fire. This year again, at the same evening hour, in the same place.
