Apologies for the lapse in posts. Drew, myself and our friends Jill and Luke took a weekend trip to Guiyang China, as we had a holiday weekend. We had a great trip, as you'll see in the upcoming posts, but we also got stuck there an extra day because of Typhoon Usagi. I will discuss that later too.
But first, the night before we left for Guiyang, our little Tai Hang neighborhood had its annual Fire Dragon Festival. They hold the festival around the same time as the Mid-Autumn festival, a very important festival for China, so there were a lot of participants. Anyways, the story behind the fire dragon is this. Back when Tai Hang was nothing more than a fishing village, a plague broke out. The people decided to pray to the god of the sea, Tin Hau, for help using the fire dragon. It worked, and the plague diminished. So, ever since then, they parade around the fire dragon once a year, from the local Tin Hau temple, around the neighborhood, and down to the sea.
Now most people would say, there is no way parading around a dragon actually saved the people from a plague. But, it's possible, and when you see the pictures of the dragon itself, you'll understand why.
This is pic of the signage marking the path of the dragon to the sea. You can see how packed it is!
Before the dragon came out, these adorable girls carrying lotus lanterns (this may have been more for the mid-autumn festival which is big on lanterns) in matching pink silk outfits.
So cute! And the lanterns had real flames! All of the policemen patrolling the parade were carrying mini fire extinguishers just in case.
The dragon!!! This is the head of the dragon. Notice all of the men either carrying the dragon, or waiting to carry it. Perhaps 30 men carried the dragon at any one time, but perhaps 100 men or more were waiting to trade spots, which they did about every 30 seconds. It makes sense, as that dragon was moving! Not an easy task to carry it.
Now you can notice why it's called the fire dragon. Literally, the dragon is on fire! It's made of twine twisted into thick rope, then thousands of incense sticks stuck into it. Now do you see why the dragon may have worked to stop the plague? The plague was probably caused by a virus carried by a mosquito. After three nights of running this dragon up and downs every street in the village (they still run the dragon for 3 nights in a row), the incense released from the dragon would have killed the bugs, slowing down the infection rate. Ha! The incense from the dragon was overpowering. At the end of the night, all of our clothes, hair, everything smelled of it.
This is the body of the dragon. Again, more twine twisted into a rope with incense stick in. The festival lasted for 3 hours each night. About once an hour, the runners would place the dragon on the ground, remove all of the old incense, and replace it with brand new stuff. That's a lot of incense!
Finally, we have a friend who lives literally in the apartment complex above the street where the festival was being held. So after we got to see the dragon up close, we went up to this friend's apartment to look out over the scene. Impressive huh?
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