DuanWuJie - Procession

The three top holidays in Taiwan are

Chinese New Year's    - Last week in Jan or first 3 weeks of Feb

MidAutumn Festival   - Last 3 weeks of Sep or first week of Oct

Dragon Boat Festival  - June

with the Chinese Lunar Calender these three are:

Chun Jie             - Beginning of the Lunar Year
Zhong Qui Jie     - 15th day of the 8th Lunar Month

Duan Wu Jie       - 5th day of the 5th Lunar Month

These dates are exact by the Chinese Lunar Calendar but vary when matched up to the Western Solar Calendar they vary within the range of a month.

Duan Wu Jie celebrates the death of a famous Chinese poet/philosopher/government official Duan Yu who died in 278 BC. So the 3rd most important festival in Chinese world is 2300 years old, it speaks to the long continuous history of the Chinese. How many Westerns celebrate the death of Socrates(who dies under similar circumstances) at about the same time?


There is a Daoist Temple in the neighborhood of my dormitory and as part of the DuanWuJie festivities the temple god goes on a parade around the neighborhood and then back to the temple. I caught the parade on the way back from class.

The sound truck has to announce the god's coming.

Here is the god him/her self(this is a joke, of course the god is a guy!)

Got to have a retinue of fancy dressers.

Fireworks to wake everyone up(and make the asthma sufferers choke).

I think this is the throne of the god.

And I got the movie(with sound)

This parade is remarkably similar to the parades in Bali but here it was the Daoists and in Bali it was the Hindus.