PingXi Lantern Festival – or – How We Avoided Death by Trampling

We’ve known about the PingXi Lantern Festival since our first year in Taiwan. However, we’ve never attended before. Last night we seized the opportunity and, with some friends, took the train to experience this end-of-the-Chinese-New-Year-Celebration event.

The crowds were incredible. We arrived just before it started to get dark and as we walked through the narrow main street of Shihfen, eating street food as we went, it seemed like the crowd just kept on building. We stopped and took the time to participate ourselves, buying a lantern and then writing wishes on it, then sent it up into the night sky to join everyone else’s lanterns.

It was like a whole bunch of fireflies or stars were floating up into the sky, becoming fainter and fainter until disappearing into the blackness.

I think the largest crowd I’ve ever encountered was last night’s in PingXi. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-Jeou showed up. We didn’t get close enough to see him but we were unfortunate enough to find ourselves in the crowd, bottle-necked behind him, as he went through the streets shaking hands and kissing babies. It was crazy how close everyone was to each other, all of us trying to figure out how we could get out of the human traffic jam to where movement could once again resume. We finally ducked down a side alley to an alternate route along the train tracks with loads more people having the same idea.

When we decided to leave we had a harrowing experience weaving and running through the crowd back to the train station. We thought we were about to miss the last train out that night. We arrived before it pulled out…only thing was that the platform was chock-full of people and the train was already bursting at the seams. That train pulled out…without us on it. We popped a squat on the platform and waited with a ton of others for the next one (it was not the last train of the night thank goodness. Otherwise the residents of PingXi would have had a riot on their hands of a bunch of stranded city-folk). The next train pulled up after about 30 minutes or so. Electricity shot through the crowd as the train approached. It was like a lottery drawing trying to guess where to stand to end up in front of the doors once the train stopped. The winners of this lottery would end up with seats! As the train came to a standstill little clusters of people up and down the platform who had gotten lucky let out cheers and hurrahs. We were some of the lucky ones as it so happened. When the doors of the train opened though it was crazy as everyone behind us pushed with a mighty heave to get in. I went into the train with half of my body on the left side of the doorway and the other contorted towards the right side. Thankfully my feet stayed underneath me and I managed to get into the train. All five of us got seats together along the bench-style side of the car for the trip out of PingXi, back to Taipei.

What a night!

End Note: It should be noted that the title does not reflect what we experienced and is only a sensationalization (we can play at that game too mainstream media) of the event. While the crowds were immense, fire was everywhere including floating up into the sky, and stray firecrackers were going off inches from ears, shoes and faces, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the Lantern Festival to others. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!