Burn the Boat

My first evening off since L’s birth was on the night of October 4th. A friend of mine was heading south for a 24 hours adventure and offered me to join for the Donggang Welcomes the Kings Peace Ceremony 東港迎王平安祭典, a triennial spiritual event I had filed in my head under The Big Boat Burning Beach Bonanza or something like that.

Donggang 東港鎭, „Eastern Port“, is 40 taxi minutes south of Kaoshiung and thus of the end of the HSR line spanning Taiwan‘s west side. If you are unlucky enough to live in a country without them: HSR stands for high speed rail. Imagine a hyperloop that goes over ground, connects every major city of your country, runs every 20-30 minutes, is three times faster then a car and carries three times the amount of people of a 747, offers clean toilets, does not require security checks, and costs less than the $100 for an uber to the next airport. I’ve been there once before, taking a ferry to Xiaoliuqu. Donggang is a small township dominated by its harbor and fishing industry. The Huaqiao fish market 東港漁港 and the harbor administration seem to be the biggest buildings in town. Walking by you can buy the popular bluefin tuna sashimi and imagine old families of fishermen and now -women scheming for influence – The Wire-style, season 2.

Every three years though, another institution takes over the city for a week, the Donggang Dongling Temple 東港東隆宮. For more than 300 years, they ask the Jade Emperor to send five Wang Ye deities 王爺神 to the city, thousands year old god kings. Around 1700, diseases were a big problem in Taiwan. An old Chinese saying was that of every 10 Chinese migrants who reached the island, “Just three remain. Six are dead, and one has returned home” (三在六亡一回頭). The Wang Ye should cleanse the town from disease and evil presence. Hence, the Dongling Temple follows an ancient Chinese tradition to summon them: they build a boat. A big one. It is this boat that gives the eight day long festivities its popular name, King’s Ship Festival or Wang Ye Boat Burning. Now guess what happens to Boaty at the end.

To say that Dongling Temple takes over the city is a simplification though. Sure, here too a lot of politics is probably involved, especially this year as it looked as if category-4 super-typhoon Krathon was aiming to wreck the South of Taiwan during the days of the event and someone had to decide to not cancel it.Certainly a tough decision. I had to cancel an open air concert for some 230 musicians once because of rain and that already was a hard call to make. And yet as the titular „festival“ promises, the whole shebang quickly escapes the influence of the temple and takes over the whole township – plus its tens of thousands of visitors.

Still. Some of the most „solemn and beautiful“ parts of the festival (Lonely Planet) like the special feast of 108 dishes are effectively restricted to people close to the Dongling Temple. And it is the temple and community that starts the process, by making sure that in the three years between one festival and the next, a boat is built. It is built mostly by volunteers, many of them talented craftspeople and artists. Built from wood by hand, its railing is embellished by carved effigies, plague gods that will carry diseases out of the city. Its sails are from white cotton, its sides painted by hand, ornamented with dragons, elephants, and sages. From bow to stern, the boat measures about 14 meters, the lengths of a full-grown humpback whale or three large SUVs parked bumper to bumper.The exact length varies and is defined through divination. After finished, it waits in the temple for the festival to begin and to end, when it will carry the Wang Ye back to heaven.

We arrived in Donggang in the afternoon of the last day, hours before the pyre. A week earlier, as was tradition, members of the community had welcomed the gods at the beach, writing their names in the sand, carrying their leader‘s name on a banner through town. This is not a simple endeavor as the gods are summoned by spirit mediums and anyone at the beach might be called and possessed by them. Frequent visitor Jenna Cody thus advises visitors to “wear quick-dry pants – you’ll probably find yourself in the water.” Yet, she urges people to attend as this is a very unique occasion: “Elsewhere in Taiwan, female spirit mediums are rare, and the ones you see rarely cut or beat themselves the way those in Donggang often do.” In the days since this year’s session, representatives of other temples had visited the Wang Ye. Then, while we were speeding south in the bullet train, the Wang Yeh were feasted a last time and volunteers carried the heavy heavy boat through town to absorb misfortune, diseases, bad spirits and other evil presence to be taken away by the gods.

(I was wondering whether the gods know about this. Since they had been coming back more than a hundred times it seemed so. How nice of them to cleanse the township! Later did I learn that the title Wang Yeh, „royal lord,“ is mostly honorific. They too are disease spirits or even demons and the festivities are best understood as an effort to buy them off. The gifts on the boat want to distract them to not unload all the ills collected by the townsfolk. How mischievous! Let’s hope for them the “going back to heaven”-part at least is true!)

When we arrived, sun was setting. Parts of the city were lacking electricity, probably due to the typhoon, but the area around the temple was of course spared. The gods were on our side, remember? Hundreds and thousands of visitors were crowding through the streets, enjoying street food, burning incense, and marveling at the proceedings. All over town small groups of mostly men, each in their own colors, carried their temples god on palanquins through the streets, often lit in colorful LED lights, sometimes dancing to techno sounds. The atmosphere was festive, religious, but of the chaotic kind so common to Taiwan‘s colorful pattern of faiths and believes.For an overview, see the fascinating last issue of A Broad and Ample Road, written my friend Albert Wu. I felt reminded of the Semana Santa I experienced about 20 years ago in Alicante in the way the communities attested their strength, but without the heaviness of the Old Testament and the awkwardness of having people dressed in weird hoods.The difference might actually be due to the maturity gained in those 20 years since. The boat was brought back to the plaza before the temple, where various rituals we didn‘t know anything about prepared it for its journey. The night was still young.

The first part of our plan was to not have a plan. My buddy and I hustled to get some bikes, spent half an hour chatting and drinking with friends of our hotel manager in the front of a laundry, dived in and out of the crowd, tried to gather our group, took photos, got some spells and talismans, found a place to eat, and then made our way slowly towards the beach. It would take the temple people from 2 to 5am to schlep the boat there, so our plan was to get to know the location and then head back for the „hotel“ for some extra 90-ish minutes of sleep. Hence the bikes. Strolling towards the beach we made friends with a group of enthusiastic boys and men who carried their god in a heavy wooden throne. Many temples in Taiwan are rumored to be involved in money laundering schemes or even to have connections to the mafia, which gave our exchange an air of adventure, but in the end it didn’t feel much different than talking to people at a German Schützenfest. They loved the idea of making friends with foreigners, offered us beer and betel nuts, and invited us to carry not their own god who had to rest but that of another group they hijacked for a few hundred meters. He was surprisingly heavy and seemed to enjoy it as much as we did.

Around the beach, we were greeted by dozens or even hundreds of vendors. Having queued for what felt like hours at music festivals in Europe only to learn that almost all food was gone, I was surprised how fast and effective everything worked. Even nine hours later after the show was over we would still be able to get every food we liked.

Then there was the beach itself. A grey band into the night, the sand at many places muddy and wet for reasons I did not fully grasp. A stranded ship in the distance gave the scenery something from a post apocalyptic movie set. Big piles of plastic bags marked the spot where the boat would burn, filled with hundreds or even thousands of tons of ghost money, paper ritually burned to appease spirits, ancestors, or godsI wrote about ghost money earlier in this essay.. In a wide circle around the pile was what looked like a wall of manned siege weapons, people lingering with their cameras on ladders to have a better view. The buzz of the drones above us was still rather peaceful. We stayed a while, and when we realized that we indeed became tired and time flew slowly like the black ooze on which we laid our blanket, we took our bikes back for one REM-cycle of sleep. Then a quick shower and with more ease than expected – thanks to the training of fatherhood – back to the beach.

The boat stood high on the piles of g… ghost money, manned by several jiaotou 七角頭, the town‘s seven religious associations. Some threw batches of it into the air like confetti, while others raised the sails or camped elsewhere on the beach, guarding their god thrones. All this was hard to see though, due to the thousands of people encircling the boat. I once saw a small model of the festival at a miniature railway museum. A single circle of people stood around the boat in an allude to an „authentic spiritual ritual.“ This was something different: ten thousand people looking for a photo for their Insta timeline.

I’m joking, it’s still a religious festival. Don’t be cynical, this is the 21st century, this is how we do it now. Especially in Taiwan.

People told me that once the boat is on fire, participants of the actual ceremony would leave. While the gods travel back to heaven, ghosts would raise from the sea and raid all the evil presence, disease and misfortunes captured in the boat for the last three years. Whoever stands between the boat and the sea in the moment the sails catch fire might have their soul taken away.

I hoped this would mean it would be easier to see the boat. Maybe I could take a good photo of the burning effigies of the plague gods. But after it was set ablaze with fireworks, not many people left. Maybe this is Selfies for Instagram after all.

Incinerated by fireworks, the boat burned light and fast. Maybe the tails of Krathon were fanning the flames. Throughout the night, the buzzing of at least 43 drones built the background for the cracking of the flames. It was majestic.

I told myself that you have to believe in the sea gods for them to direct their mischief onto you. Also, this is ten thousand people, and how many gods can there be, so what are the odds?

Mostly out of convenience, I had oriented towards the south and east, with a good view on the sea in the west. When I later circled the still flaming carcass of the boat, long after even the masts were set ablaze, I found a weird circle of offerings. It looked a bit like the soulless remains of a sad creature who might have looked for a good place to see the sails catch fire, right between the boat and the sea.

As always unless stated otherwise, all photos here are my own. I accidentally but somewhat expectedly bumped into a photography buddy of mine from Taipei. On Instagram you can find his images of the preparation, schlepping, and burning of the boat. Here are one, two more images by Gregory Garde, a member of our group, from the last festival 2001. There are probably billions of photos online from the event – so I didn’t even start looking. This drone footage from three years ago made it in front of my eyeballs nonetheless. So did this video, which seems to be a rather typical one from this year featuring one of the boat painters. It gives an insight into the spirit of the event for some Taiwanese participants. There was a great DW documentary on Taiwan featuring the festival that for some reason was taken down.

I gathered most information from the Chinese wikipedia entries. This blog article by Steven Crook was an entertaining and essential source for most of the details—which I didn’t check further. This blog article by Nick Kemble helped me too prepare for the trip.