to 9:00 p.m., for a total of 900 lanterns (on the first night) and 1,350 lanterns (on the second night). In case you wanted to see my point of view (POV), I included my video below: https://youtu.be/PeT6_jbmjGI
Although I didn’t participate in the official release that I mentioned above, my friends and I bought our own lantern on the main Shifen street and wrote our wishes for the new year. We chose a lantern with four colors that corresponded to what we were wishing for. Blue was related to a promotion (or what we interpreted as work), white was a bright future (future goals/dreams), pink was happiness and purple was study (so maybe things we wanted to learn or achieve academically). Lighting your own lantern is offered year-round in this town, but it felt especially magical to do it during the actual holiday and with many other hopeful individuals.
The Lantern Festival is considered a part of the longer celebration of the Lunar New Year. Every year, the date changes according to the lunar calendar, but the festival takes place on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year.
The tradition of releasing sky lanterns, 天燈 or tiandeng, originally started back in the Fujian province in China, where many Taiwanese’ ancestors came from (similar to how many Americans originally came from England). Some historians say that starting in the mid-1800s, villagers in Pingxi sometimes lit lanterns to inform others that an area was free of bandits.
