Yenshui Fireworks Festival

March 7, 2007 7:41 PM

The annual fireworks festival at the town of YenShui in southern Taiwan is notable for many reasons, notwithstanding the extreme danger to the many participants (youtube link). Large “beehive” structures created by the townspeople each contain hundreds of rockets which are launched into the crowd. (youtube link). The ubiqui-pedia link is here
posted by mattoxic (9 comments total)

Yowsa, crazy stuff.
I spent a while working in a small town down in southwest Sichuan where New Year's got a little crzy but nothing approaching that scale, except that I did hear tales (fortunately never saw) of people running out of fireworks drunk and using blast detonator caps with predicable results (dynamite is easy to get in rural mainland China and everyone uses it for digging projects. The one license in that village must have passed through a hundred hands despite being photo ID).
Anything for the 热闹, and bonus if you can 驱邪 at the same time!
posted by Abiezer at 7:58 PM on March 7, 2007

Light Fuse. Get Away Close In.
Use Only Under Adult Supervision! Bring the kids!
posted by hal9k at 8:23 PM on March 7, 2007

ubiqui-pedia. I like it.
Hmmm... All the TLDs for ubiquipedia and ubiqui-pedia are available....
posted by wendell at 9:16 PM on March 7, 2007

I was in a in China (Dandong) and upon getting back to my hotel, I noticed a bunch of men carrying box after box out into the street. It turns out each of these boxes, each about the size of a standard moving box, was filled with fireworks mortars. They lit them off, all sitting next to each other, and basically we all just stood there, about 15 feet from these ridiculous fireworks, watching them all go off and land on roofs of buildings and set off all the car alarms within 500 feet.

Nobody got hurt or even seemed to have any opinion other than, "Ooh, neat fireworks!" It makes me pretty disappointed to think about how, in the state I live in, we can basically only have sparklers because other things are considered too dangerous, but I guess if I consider the laundry list of things that are "too dangerous" here and "who cares" in Dandong, I'm probably OK with it.
posted by thethirdman at 12:51 AM on March 8, 2007

On first mis-read, I really didn't doubt that the anal fireworks festival was indeed "notable for many reasons".
posted by dreamsign at 2:05 AM on March 8, 2007

Back in the ur-Internet days, my Taiwanese grad-student roommate and a couple of his school buds explained about this to me. I thought either their marginal English wasn't getting through, or they were exaggerating about the amount of ordnance expended. Like Harry Belafonte used to sing, "Okay, now I believe you."
posted by pax digita at 5:25 AM on March 8, 2007

Ah huh, the other "notable reason" was lost in my cut/paste

The longest fire cracker trail in the world, 11km (8 miles)

(cached link)
posted by mattoxic at 6:12 AM on March 8, 2007

I heart Taiwan...
posted by Dr.James.Orin.Incandenza at 7:52 AM on March 8, 2007

And I thought 4th of July in an Francisco's Mission district was intense.
posted by treepour at 10:00 AM on March 8, 2007