The international honors for the Pingsi Sky Lantern Festival continue to pile on — just recently, it was named one of National Geographic’s top 10 winter trips for this year.
Meanwhile in Taiwan, the festival continues to expand and become more elaborate. Despite the expected massive crowds and the excruciatingly long waiting times for buses to get there and back (cars are not allowed during festival times), the sight of hundreds of brightly colored lanterns rising into the sky in unison is something worth seeing at least once.
This year, the official festivities take place on Feb. 11, Feb. 14 and Feb. 22, with an estimated total of 3,280 lanterns to be set off into the sky over eight separate waves per event. Musical performances are held between each wave.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Registration to take place in the mass lantern set off begins at 10:30am each day, but you can also buy your own lanterns at local stores — as long as you only set them off between 6am and 10pm in designated areas.
Remember to write your wishes on the lantern — the lanterns were used for communication purposes in mountainous terrain during the late 1800s, but now they’re used to pray for better luck.
The first event has a children’s theme — and the main 2.4m-wide lantern is created by illustrator Crystal Hung (克里斯多, real name Hung Ya-yan, 洪佳妍) using 3,000 fingerprints of both adults and children collected during an earlier Christmas event. A total of 480 lanterns will be set off during this event — less than half of that for the next two events, so choose wisely.
The Feb. 14 event is of course Valentine’s Day-themed, featuring 200 lanterns with lovers’ fingerprints on them and 1,200 regular ones. Feb. 22 features 1,600 lanterns, with the 4.8m-wide main one created using photos from 53 countries that 6-year-old girl Ching Ching (晴晴), whose dream is to travel the world, collected via Facebook.
Aside from the lantern festival, the area’s old mining communities of Jingtong (菁桐), Pingsi and Shihfen (十分) are well worth visiting with picturesque old streets and several walking paths. Also nearby is the Shihfen Waterfall, which re-opened to the public in December 2014.
If you happen to see any sky lantern debris during your explorations, take them back to the three designated shops in town for recycling and receive store credit in exchange. Don’t leave them there, it’s bad for the environment.
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