Yanshui
The Town That Sets Fire to Itself
Copyright Kevin Ryan - 2018 Produced by Kaparu2 Publications No part of this publication can be reproduced without the written agreement of the author. A personal project as a contribution to Charnwood Arts - People Making Places
Beehive Festival
Yanshui, Taiwan
A God of War Bringing Peace and Well-being
Not many people beyond Taiwan had heard of Yanshui until the last decade but in an era of super-global communications its fame is growing world-wide. It now hits the top ten list hosting one of the most dangerous festivals on the planet. So it’s not surprising to bump into TV crews and photographers from around the world coming to record this pyrotechnic spectacle. Yet few seem to dig deeper into the heart of the event and its meaning for the people of the town and surrounding districts.
My first visit to Yanshui was in 2015. I was staying with friends in the Taiwanese city of Tainan to the south. The invitation was spontaneous as was my reply…I’d heard of the festival and was excited by the possibility of going, but if I am honest also a little nervous… There were five of us and we mostly stuck together as a group. One person ‘L’ appointed themselves as my ‘guardian’ and came armed with a large sheet of cardboard. We all brought thick coats, scarves and the obligatory crash helmet.
We arrived after dark in an environment thick with smoke and humidity, parking the car down a farm track and walking into the town. The night air was already being punctuated by small displays of rocket fire and distant sounds of other activity. On the outskirts of town we came across a temporary stage structure resembling a temple façade. In front of the ‘temple’ there were two rows of pimped four by four trucks each surmounted by a pole dancer.
This mix of religion, pimped vehicles, nubile dancers and modern dance music is a curious cultural manifestation when first encountered but it’s now something I take as commonplace in Taiwan processional culture. In rural locations in the past it was not uncommon for nude dancers to perform at funerals and even to park themselves on peoples laps! The nudity may have disappeared, by decree, but the suggestiveness of the dancers in scant, tight costumes has not.
Behind us on the road two men decided to festoon themselves in firecrackers and then lit the fuses‌not quite the film ‘Man on Fire’ but the title fits! This is a festival that leads many to total immersion...
We reached the grounds of a school – in the middle sat three structures – the middle one as big as a large pantechnicon. When the side doors opened we could see it was arranged in three levels. Dignitaries and their families sat on stands to one end fronted by a see through netting as protection. Expectation grew and everyone donned their helmets and tightened the protection around their necks. The latter is vital. One way a rocket can end up doing serious damage is by leaving a gap for it to enter below the helmet rim. Scarred and burnt faces and lost eyes and hearing can be the result.
Preparations are made to ignite the fuses. My guardian angel ‘L’ leans over to me and says – “there are 400,000 rockets in the big one”. My mouth drops open… there are thousands of people gathered on both sides, I’m calculating the chances of being hit…
At first the rockets arc above our heads striking into the depth of the crowd, I turn to watch and then back, SMACK! A rocket hits my visor, right between my eyes, the force pushes my head back and it explodes in a shower of sparks and skids off to hit someone else. The shock subsides and I quickly check to make sure the visor is intact…it was lucky that my camera wasn’t raised at that point...and that my dear friend Ming’s borrowed helmet is still in one piece!
Taking photographs when gloved, helmeted and wrapped in a heavy coat when the temperature and humidity are off the scale is one thing‌when you are in front of a rocket battery firing off rockets at the rate of twenty machine guns in front of you is quite another. I wasn’t looking forward to losing a lens, and although some photographers go to great and amusing lengths to protect their cameras I value my freedom of movement too much. The risk was worth it.
Later I encounter numerous batteries of rockets in the narrow streets, here the sense of being directly under fire intensifies. There are hard-core encounters with the rocket launchers from experienced warriors who are fully kitted to withstand the onslaught from close quarters. There are other more foolhardy attendees with little or no protection who risk losing an eye or getting seriously burnt. I saw more than one person catch fire, but no serious injuries. I gained the blessings of numerous minor burns from rocket hits myself! Each bee sting brings good fortune - for many the idea is to get hit as much as possible...
I was luckier than I realised. My first encounter with this extraordinary event, and I had spent hours in the middle of it all, only to discover my neck guard towel had failed somewhere along the way leaving a gaping space for rockets to enter. At the end of it my ‘guardian’ told me how brave I was and that as a group they had never been so up close to it all before. I told them they were mistaken, what they had taken for courage was my belief that I was following them!
Yanshui - The Town That Sets Fire to Itself
The rocket batteries are known as ‘gun-walls’ or ‘bee-hives’ and to be hit by a rocket is considered good luck and a blessing. Like many modern continuations or revivals of old festivals in Taiwan there are religious (mainly Taoist and Buddhist) links back to mainland China but the particular conditions of early migration to Taiwan also shape many of them. Plague and disease were great killers and the origins of Yanshui’s festival, close to Chinese New Year and the Lantern Festival, greets and clears the way for good fortune in the coming year. Rather than in vanquishing evil and the plague, bringing peace, safety and good fortune to oneself and the community are more its modern aims.
In those early days Yanshui suffered a devastating outbreak of cholera that began to decimate the population. The tradition of the ‘beehive fireworks’ originated in 1885 as the epidemic raged through the streets. The local population, living in fear, began praying to Guan Gong, the red faced god of war, to bring an end to this disaster and save them. On the Lantern Festival evening, Guan Gong appointed General Zhou Cang as his guide. His palanquin was accompanied by multitudes of followers setting off firecrackers along the road. They wound their way through the town until the break of dawn. The following day the plague is reported to have turned and was gone!
The ritual procession of the palanquins continues as does the ever increasing numbers of firecrackers, beehive rockets and thousands of colourful sky rockets. The beehive rockets alone are numbered in the millions. The air becomes dark and thick with their spent residue.
The photographs published here are all from my second visit to Yanshui in 2016. A longer, more considered visit to the town to get a better sense of other sides of the festival. It’s an intense period of time as so many of the longer Taiwanese ritual festivals are and begins with a beautiful lantern festival welcoming in the Chinese New Year. Beyond this people visit the temples and parade the palanquins around the town and set up a large market to engage the thousands of visitors who come every year. There are a number of stories to tell about the different aspects of the festival but for now, here, I’ve chosen to focus on the night-time engagement of people when Guan Gong is invoked to protect the town.
I have become increasingly interested in temple culture in Taiwan but also in having longer, deeper discussions with the people involved in these religious and cultural traditions. The events themselves are can be challenging for photographers. It also takes time and effort to understand the complexities of the events and the rituals underpinning them. Far more than two visits to this event would be needed to reveal even a basic understanding of its religious and folk cultural underpinnings and really some immersion in the process of preparing for it would realisitically be required. Getting to know local people is essential to getting behind the elaborate meanings and the range of interpretations people have built up over the years.
It can be physically challenging. Very long hours, photographing day and night in the heat, carrying equipment, keeping hydrated and at Yanshui especially, staying safe!
We live in fast moving visual as well as physical environments - media rich but all too often, they are prolonged attention poor. Go back and look at that last sequence of images again and imagine the intensity of the experience contained there, the heat, smell, smoke, noise, the sense of being engaged in a collective act, adrenalin, excitement, movement and of course the bruising and burning power of those rocket strikes on exposed or lightly covered skin, visors, bodies and legs. Now consider that across two nights of such intense intermittent activity as the gods tour the town...
At Yanshui’s Beehive Festival I wanted to get close to the people experiencing the intensity of the event. There are spectacular pictures to be had by standing off but on this occasion I wanted to photograph on the move with the crowds and processions and in the firing line. I wanted to capture the atmosphere and excitement but also the pre and post explosive moments, of preparation, crowd gathering and aftermath.
Photographing close in brings its own problems as places become inundated with people, there’s rapid movement as people dance against the fire and things are obscured by thick smoke. Focusing the camera through a visor obscured with moisture and smoke in the heat also becomes an interesting exercise! There are also the times when you have to negotiate the thick crush of people in the narrow streets and increasingly it seems, the wall of smart phone screens that can quickly become the foreground of any image!
As a photographer, understanding your equipment is important, both its limitations and potentials. Understanding the basic science of photography and composition is important too, yet beyond that every photographer ‘of the moment’ worth their salt also knows the importance of the power of an image to evoke an emotional response. As vital as all these things are it is imperative to be in the ‘right place at the right time’ - whatever that might mean in any specific instance. There is an enormous sense of gratitiude to the friends, old and new, who helped me to visit Yanshui for these extraordinary events. This publication is really yours.
As a photographer I have two themes which motivate me and characterise my approach. At first, entering any environment that is not my own, irrespective of how much research I do beforehand, I am still and perhaps always will be ‘a stranger in a strange land’. I can only photograph what I see and interpret it as I will. My immediate motivation behind an image may be aesthetic, thematic, reportage, experimental, to create a collection or a source of recollection for future project work or simply to make contact and promote dialogue...it may, arguably, be an objective view...at best, perhaps different from others in terms of what I focus on. It is through dialogue that my second motivational theme comes more to the fore. This second approach to my work is through the idea of ‘people making places’ an engagement with the stories and perceptions that people have of their own environments and social milieu...beyond the spectacle of Yanshui there are deeply held feelings and a wealth of meaning...I may never be a fully part of them but I may understand something of them through relationships and sharing the benefits of those relationships. It may be then that the telling of these things becomes a collective more than a personal act. I always hope for these relationships to develop and deepen.