I made my transition from Taipei to Hong Kong a few days ago. I was a little sad to go. Taipei was a beautiful and relaxing city, even though my bedroom sat above one of the busiest night markets.
Night markets seem to be a phenomenon to unique to Taiwan. They are fairly old and sprung up to provide services around temples. Even today, they still provide religion objects like incense and gold paper. In the temples, people will burn gold colored paper as a way to provide money to their relatives in the afterlife. The fire is the transition of the money into the afterlife.
I wanted to write a post about some of the religious parades I saw while living right next to the temple. The festival was the eve of Mazu's birthday - 妈祖生日. Mazu is the goddess of the sea in Chinese religion and protects sailors and fishermen.
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| The pre-birthday party started off with a military marching band |
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| They did patterns, formations, and twirls of their guns. |
The rest of the day was then filled by paraders of different religious figures. With my broken Chinese, I was able to learn the names of a few of them from a lady near the temple.
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| The first two figures are the guardians of the underworld. |
The two figures were generals and best friends. The guy in black is Qiye 七爺. He is black because he drowned in a flood. He knew the flood was coming, but risked his life to not miss his appointment with the second figure Baye 八爺.
Baye has his tongue out because he hung himself in mourning of the death of Qiye. I get the value of commitment to your friend, but Qiye would have been doing both of them a favor is he had just taken a raincheck on their appointment.... The two are commonly found at temples and have something to do with guiding people into the afterlife.
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| Not really sure who this guys is, but he looks cool! |
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| The man in front is Tudigong 土地公 - the God of Earth. |
Tudigong as the god of the earth is also associated with wealth because he is the god of minerals and buried treasure. I've always wanted to find some treasure... so maybe I should have prayed to him while in Taiwan. Missed that opportunity! Now, I'll never find buried treasure.
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| Not really sure about these guys, either. They look scary! |
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| Some more tall guys I know nothing about. |
During Chinese New Year and this festival, the Chinese love lighting fire works. They would string out really long lines of fire crackers and light them.
I got scared at the end and had to turn away : )
I thought the firecrackers under the movable shrine was so funny. I don't know what it symbolizes, but the cart is supposed to represent a shrine to someone... I know a lot about Taiwanese culture.
At the end of the festival, everyone gathered in front of the temple and people put on different performances. They had two dragon dances. The finale of the first dragon dance was to hoist the dragon onto the pole as you saw in the video. The pole must have been like 20 feet tall! There wasn't any footholds either - just a big log!
Luckily, I was able to go on my roof and watch all the festivities without having to fight the crowds.
