Tainan Phoo Tse Lantern Festival

The Puji Temple is hidden away in a quiet backstreet, but its lantern festival brings neighbors together and offers the locale new opportunities.

Every lantern tells a story

According to legend, the city of Tainan resembles a phoenix that is flying north. The Puji Temple is found right at the tip of the phoenix’s beak, keeping it under control and protecting the city’s prosperity. Located outside the old city limits, Puji is Taiwan’s oldest Wangye temple, and its deity is the Chifu Wangye.

The temple used to be full of worshippers, and commerce boomed around it. Official announcements would be posted at the temple’s shengyu (“imperial decree”) board, which remains one of its most important artifacts. Jiang Wenzheng, who grew up next to the temple, recalls that every year for Wangye’s birthday in the sixth lunar month, the perform­ances of Taiwanese Opera put on for the deity’s pleasure could extend for a full four weeks. The temple was certainly quite prosperous back then.

But with the widening of nearby streets, the temple and its grounds turned into more of a quiet refuge from the hubbub of Guohua Street and Hai’an Road.

Jiang and several good friends from childhood who had been pondering how to revive the temple to its former bustling glory formed the Puji Cultural Studies Associ­ation (PCSA). Aside from combing through local historical documents, the association has invited neighbors to hang and decorate lanterns during the lantern festival.

The Phoo Tse Lantern Festival has been put on for ten years and attracts tourists from far and wide, turning the temple into a must-see at Chinese New Year’s in Tainan. But as far as the neighboring community is concerned, says Jiang, “the festival is just a vehicle for greater engagement, through which we connect with neighbors.” Each lantern is painted individually by local residents. Volunteers coat them with tung oil for protection before hanging them in the temple’s front courtyard. When lit in the evening, the long lines of lanterns form beautiful tunnels of light.

But the festival wasn’t an immediate success. Jiang recalls the hard times early on: The association’s volunteers went door to door giving out unpainted lanterns that they asked residents to decorate, but when they went to collect them again, they only got back just over half, and most of these were still unpainted. So they had to set to work and paint them themselves. One year, when the lights were scheduled to be turned on the next day, it rained unmercifully through the night, leaving many of the lanterns in tatters. Surveying the damage brought tears to one’s eyes. But the shopkeepers and resi­dents around the temple put aside what they were doing on that day and knelt in the temple’s front courtyard, patching the lanterns with tape. Busy into the wee hours of the morning, they eventually hung up all of the original lanterns. “That’s the ‘Phoo Tse spirit,’” says Jiang.

Tainan’s Phoo Tse Lantern Festival relies on everybody pitching in, including by painting and hanging their own lanterns. Each paper lamp bears its own story. (courtesy of PCSA)

Jiang Wenzheng has played an important role in developing the Phoo Tse Lantern Festival.

Becoming part of living memory

For ten years, the Phoo Tse Temple Lantern Festival has been held on the 25th day of the 12th lunar month. According to custom, on the previous day most folk gods return to heaven to report on their duties. But Wangye leaves earlier, with devotees coming to send him off on the 20th. On the 25th, Wangye returns to live among the people. Consequently, the day that they open the temple door to welcome Wangye back has become the first day of the Phoo Tse Lantern Festival. Jiang explains that the yearly cycles of life for people in farming communities have traditionally been connected to the land—ploughing in spring, cultivating in summer, harvesting in autumn, and storing in winter. His hope is that the Phoo Tse Lantern Festival will likewise become a regular part of local people’s lives.

Raising money for the festival, which is put on by the local people themselves, is difficult. Jiang has complained to Wangye before, but the Taoist priests who serve as the deity’s intermediaries gave this response: “Every­one do what you can. You won’t get much, but it will be enough.”

In recent years, the PCSA has worked with the local community care center to provide the elderly with lanterns to paint, and the seniors, who typically aren’t too fond of getting out, have asked to visit the festival in person. Apart from fostering a sense of being appreciated among participants, the activity has also created some beautiful memories around three generations enjoying the lantern festival together. The association has also worked with the Huashan Social Welfare Foundation to invite mentally handicapped people to create some lanterns. “This isn’t simply ‘art therapy.’ It also gets mentally handicapped people to leave the house and connect with society.”

The steady feedback Jiang gets makes it hard for him to let go of the work. Some kids start painting their own lanterns in sixth grade and then continue right through high school. Every year, family members come to the fest­ival, craning their necks upward to see their handiwork. Even young people who have moved north will return to Tainan to stroll under the lanterns with their mothers. It creates precious memories of spending time together.

Through the stories that they bring to each of the lanterns, the participants make the Phoo Tse Lantern Fest­ival an event that attracts a lot of attention in Tainan at New Year’s, and one that leaves lasting impressions in the memories of local residents.

courtesy of PCSA

The Tainan Phoo Tse Lantern Festival put on a “Taiwan Festival” in Tokyo. The lanterns hung under the Tokyo Tower brought a taste of Taiwan’s charms to the city. (courtesy of PCSA)

Yuejin Lantern Festival

The Yuejin Lantern Festival, which is known as one of Taiwan’s most beautiful, uses art to transform the face of the small town.

Flying Moonlight, Yu-Yu Art Studio

Transforming a small town with art

Winner of a German Red Dot Design Award and known as one of Taiwan’s most beautiful lantern fest­ivals, the Yuejin Lantern Festival in Tainan’s Yanshui District embraces the animating idea that “everyone can use their own strengths to help their hometown.” So explain the festival’s young founders, brothers Chen Yu-lin and Chen Yu-ting.

The old saying “Tainan first, Lugang second, Wanhua third, and Yuejin fourth” bears witness to Yuejin’s former glory as a bustling port. But when Chen Yu-lin and Chen Yu-ting were children, Yuejin seemed a place that time had forgotten. To attend high school, they had to commute to a neighboring town. Jobs were hard to come by, so people left for brighter prospects elsewhere, with little expectation of ever coming back home to live.

Yet, upon finishing their university studies, the two brothers returned home to establish the YuYu Art Studio. In 2009, a project to spruce up Yuejin’s former harbor area was finished, and the two brothers recom­mended extending the single day of celebrations planned to mark the project’s com­pletion to a month-long lantern festival. The approach the designers took introduced a new visual experience when the town’s first lantern festival launched.

“We were more interested in gaining an entrée to the town by organizing events, and from there seeking out more opportunities,” Chen Yu-ting says. He had for many years gone to overseas arts festivals with his teachers. “We thought using art as an entrée might be a feasible approach.” The example of Yanshui now serves as living proof: The Yuejin Lantern Festival attracts large crowds, bringing the town recognition. Since its founding, local government agencies have taken it upon themselves to tackle more tangible matters—such as improvements to street lighting, transportation, public health awareness, and so forth. The festival demonstrates how intangible activities can have an impact on physical infrastructure.

Yanshui is famous for its “beehive” firecrackers, so why didn’t they start with them as a theme? “We ought to go make the change we’re capable of and ‘create culture.’ That’s how culture works: People’s actions accumu­late over time to form new culture.” And over the last decade the Yuejin Lantern Festival has become part of Yanshui’s emerging new culture, accompanying the local children as they grow up.

“At first, the elders didn’t understand what we were doing, but after several years they discovered that their grandchildren were willing to come back home during the lantern festival, so their impressions of the festival changed,” explains Yu-ting. “Recently an old lady in her sixties or seventies told me that last year’s lanterns were better, and asked me to pass along a message to the artists to work harder.” Art is getting discussed in this small town, and Chen Yu-ting’s hometown, where he still lives, is changing bit by bit.

Chen Yu-lin (center), Chen Yu-ting (second from right), and their team from YuYu Art Studio hope to shine a spotlight on their hometown by enlivening it with art. Their work Time Light is behind them.

Spotlighting the hometown

From the festival’s second year, they started to invite bids to organize it. The YuYu Art Studio has yet to make a bid itself. “We’ve wanted to see more talented people come in to do it,” says Chen Yu-ting. “That’s the only way to broaden the festival’s scope and ambitions.” It has been handled successively by teams with different strengths and skills, including the architect Liu Kuo-chang, who focused on the environment of light; Urban Art Studio, which has expertise in curation and in working with international artists; and UxU Studio, which drew on resources from Amsterdam. Those teams put their own spin on Yuejin’s unique charms.

When the festival was first proposed, the two brothers had actually been planning on turning Yanshui into an “art town.” They didn’t expect that it would take ten years to make progress on that front. In 2019 the YueJin Art Museum was established as a “museum without walls.” It aims to enliven the town with art, bringing greater visibility to the place. It is hoped that the town will become an “incubator of dreams,” attracting a vari­ety of artists to come and live there.

These ideas grew out of the Chen brothers’ deep concern for their hometown’s future. With Taiwan’s low birth rate, its small towns will only be able to survive if they can find new ways to create value. If they could make Yanshui into an art town, with regulations and facilities that support artistic creation and the art business, and with public agencies providing assistance to encourage artists to relocate there, that might be a way to assure the town’s continued existence.

The Yuejin Lantern Festival celebrated its tenth year in 2022. Urban Art Studio, which is curating the fest­ival this year, has written on its website: “The common ­English word ‘present’ bears two meanings: ‘now’ and ‘gift.’ As we have been in a pandemic over the past two years, ‘living well in the moment’ has been the greatest expectation we can have for our lives. As we walk toward the future, the present is tightly embracing us.” For a decade now, each unique edition of the annual Yuejin Lantern Festival has been a beautiful present to those who behold it. The present in Yanshui is created by each generation’s hard work, and the lantern festival serves as a vessel for local people to express their attachment to their hometown and their expectations for its future.