"By capitalizing on regional customs and native crafts, Taiwan's large-scale tourism events are attracting growing numbers of local and international visitors.
Like all journalists, travel writers are skeptics. When picking up a leaflet from the Tourism Bureau of the Republic of China that gushes "Festival Island--Taiwan's calendar is filled with an endless stream of festivals ... [that] can give you a deep and fascinating insight into the many faces of Taiwan," the reporter's instinct is to disregard or discount it.
Yet festivals are undoubtedly a big part of local life and a major driver of Taiwan's tourist industry. There is a historical reason for this: Before Taiwan became an affluent society, events like gods' birthdays and pilgrimages offered important diversions. For ordinary people, these festivals--along with family events like weddings--provided occasions when they could take time out from the daily struggle to relax and enjoy themselves.
Like most of those who attend the Lantern Festival, a colorful multi-day, multi-city event that occurs two weeks after the Lunar New Year, Taiwanese day-trippers account for the bulk of the visitors at the Songjiang Battle Array in Kaohsiung County, Hsinchu City's Glass Art Street Carnival or the Mid-Summer Ghost Festival in the northwest port city of Keelung. However, while international visitors remain a minority, their numbers are growing.
"Taiwan's festivals are without doubt a major draw for overseas Chinese," says Elisa Lim, a freelance reporter who has written about Taiwan for Chinese-language magazines and newspapers in Hong Kong and Malaysia as well as in her native Singapore. "Many are curious about the customs of an island that's often and rightly described as 'the most Chinese place on Earth.'"
As the Tourism Bureau leaflet goes on to explain, Taiwan's roster of festivals has grown considerably in recent years. Local governments throughout the island have created events that they hope will attract free-spending visitors, such as the Hsinchu City International Glass Art Festival, which is held every two years, and the annual Hsinchu City Glass Art Street Carnival.
Glassy Tradition
Before the northern Taiwan city of Hsinchu emerged as a center of high-tech manufacturing, its three most famous products were rice noodles, meatballs and glass. It used to be said that 80 percent of the lights on North American Christmas trees were made in Hsinchu.
The Hsinchu City International Glass Art Festival was founded in 1995 to showcase the works of domestic and foreign glass artists, provide a venue for artists from different countries to share their experiences and ideas and promote the achievements of the local glass art industry. Since 1999, the Hsinchu Municipal Glass Arts and Crafts Museum has served as the main venue for the biennial festival. The first iteration in 1995 drew almost 200,000 local and international visitors, and the number has increased steadily ever since, with some 370,000 people attending the 65-day event in 2008. Sales of tickets, priced at NT$20 or $10 (US$0.61 or $0.30), reached an overall total of NT$5.34 million (US$161,800) in 2008.
While the festival is international in scope, Taiwanese glass artists have been given plenty of opportunities to share the stage with their foreign counterparts. At the 2008 International Glass Art Festival, some 50 Taiwan-based artists contributed 61 pieces.
Over the years, the International Glass Art Festival has also featured some striking collaborations between foreign and local artists, such as 1999's Jail of Glass, which was designed by Stephanie Juenemann and Ralf Schmitt of Germany. A replica of a prison cell, complete with a prisoner's meager possessions, Hsinchu craftsmen constructed it based on Juenemann and Schmitt's design, cutting its parts with lasers and by hand.
"Everyone knows that Taiwan's education system doesn't encourage creativity that much," says Leanne Hou, a vocational high-school art teacher in Tainan County who has taken groups of her students to the last three glass festivals. "That's why it's very important for our youngsters to see what other Taiwanese have achieved. I know it inspires them."
The annual Hsinchu City Glass Art Street Carnival, on the other hand, places the spotlight squarely on local glass artists. This year's event, which kicked off on January 16, one week before the beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday, featured 48 well-known glass artists displaying works featuring the ox, as this is the Year of the Ox according to the Chinese zodiac. Many pieces based on the ox theme were available for purchase, and visitors received discount coupons to encourage them to do so. The carnival also provides a good opportunity to experience a bit of local color, as it includes outdoor arts performances such as dance and drama, street food and parent-child activities.
Participants in the Songjiang Battle Array in Neimen Township, Kaohsiung County (File Photo)
At a press conference marking the start of Hsinchu's 2009 Glass Art Street Carnival, which ran from January 16 through April 5, Deputy Mayor Chen Chuan-kuei described the event as "uniting glass arts and the radiant beauty of our 'garden city.'"
Aside from festivals devoted to food and special local products, there is a third type of new event--one that adds peripheral activities to an established tradition so it can be repackaged and presented to a wider audience. The International Qixi Arts Festival in Tainan, southern Taiwan falls into this category. First held in 2002, the event builds on a coming-of-age ceremony unique to the southern Taiwan city. Formerly, those wishing to participate in the ceremony, which involves crawling under an altar in Tainan's Kailong Temple, had to purchase special clothing, shoes and hats in order to take part in the associated rites. They also had to prepare specific items for it including a duck, a chicken and a red rice cake. Nowadays the clothes can be rented and the offerings need not follow custom so closely. Moreover, the Tainan City Government has also begun offering folk performances and pop concerts to broaden the appeal of the festival.
Leveraged for Success
The economic motive behind new festivals such as Qixi's is obvious. In at least two other places in Taiwan, similarly age-old traditions have been successfully leveraged into massive tourist events. Each spring, visitors--and their dollars--flood into Neimen Township in Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan for the week-long Songjiang Battle Array.
"The Songjiang Battle Array is the most important and lively festival in Kaohsiung County," says Sun Chun-liang, section chief of the marketing branch of the county government's Department of Tourism. "It's a celebration of Guanyin's [a compassionate bodhisattva] birthday, and the battle array performances in front of the temple are a way of honoring the gods. What's more, the battle array has a protective function--to exorcise evil spirits from the borders of Neimen Township."
A typical battle array group features a leader who directs his or her 36- or 72-member team with a flag, leading them through different formations to the accompaniment of drums, gongs and cymbals. The Neimen battle array is so old its origins are unclear. Some believe the tradition dates from the late 17th century, when soldiers who had accompanied Koxinga--the Ming dynasty loyalist who evicted the Dutch from Tainan--settled in the countryside. When not busy farming, they practiced fighting skills to prepare for defending against aboriginal raids or clan strife. Others think the battle array could be a case of life imitating art, a pastime inspired by The Water Margin, one of the four great novels in classical Chinese literature.
More than a dozen other communities in southwest Taiwan have battle array traditions, but Neimen's is by far the strongest. Some attribute this to the township's remoteness, arguing that before the automobile era, few other ideas or customs were able to find a footing and displace the battle array as a focus of community life. Others think the Neimen festival's strength may be a result of the township's erstwhile position on the front line between Han settlers and aboriginal tribes.
According to Gao Jiu-ya, a senior clerk in the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Kaohsiung County Government, each year around 200,000 people go to Neimen, which has fewer than 17,000 residents, to see the battle array. Each visitor spends an average of NT$500 (US$15) on snacks and souvenirs, she says.
Zhang Mei-ling, a vendor of stinky tofu near Neimen's Zizhu Temple, thinks that the local government's estimate of NT$500 per visitor is too high, but adds, "For me, one day during the battle array is better than a week at other times."
The Kaohsiung County Government has made a conscious effort to broaden the battle array's appeal, in part by launching the annual Creative Songjiang Battle Array College Cup in 2005. The participants in the cup are encouraged to come up with their own creative "battle formations" and are free to innovate so long as their performances uphold the core principles of the battle array: defense of one's homeland, communal drilling to build up strength, loyalty, mutual support and derring-do. As any kind of music can be used and props other than weapons are acceptable, recent College Cups have seen tap dancing, hip-hop and cheerleading formations.
[...]Boosting Visibility
The Tourism Bureau sees the island's festivals as a way of enhancing Taiwan's general visibility, bureau officials say. Events that have the potential to attract international sightseers are promoted through cooperation with travel agencies and the media, as well as via multilingual websites and leaflets.
Officials explain that, as part of the bureau's endeavors to turn Taiwan into one of Asia's main tourism destinations, it selects for international marketing those festivals that best present local life and that offer "display windows" through which to appreciate Taiwan's cultural characteristics.
Because folk customs and religion are close to the average person's life, festivals with those themes tend to draw a lot of domestic tourists. But, officials explain, if transportation and lodging can be coordinated, those same events can also attract many people from overseas because of their cultural content. The Lantern Festival, the Dajia Matsu Sightseeing and Culture Festival in central Taiwan, the Songjiang Battle Array in Kaohsiung County and Keelung's Mid-Summer Ghost Festival are all examples of this attraction, they say. The fame of the Lantern Festival is such that it has been featured on Discovery Networks International's Travel & Living Channel.
The Dajia Matsu Sightseeing and Culture Festival is a tourist-oriented presentation of what is said to be the largest religious event in the world outside India--the annual pilgrimage from Dajia in Taichung County to Xingang in Chiayi County in honor of Matsu, the Goddess of the Sea and one of Taiwan's most popular deities. The pilgrimage lasts eight days and covers 300 kilometers. Despite a growing interest among the non-religious, the bulk of those taking part still do so out of piety.
The Lantern Festival and another event, the annual Taiwan Culinary Exhibition, are directly funded by the Tourism Bureau. Other festivals are subsidized on a case-by-case basis, officials say, explaining that those that are "distinctive, focused, unique and that have a theme suitable for international marketing" are more likely to be successful. The Tourism Bureau is not the only central government unit assisting festivals in Taiwan, however, as the Council for Cultural Affairs is also often listed as a sponsor.
Tourism Bureau officials say local governments are advised to be active and optimistic when planning festivals and to consider everything from the viewpoint of potential tourists. The most successful themes are usually unique local customs or crafts.
Considered together, Taiwan's festivals amount to a multi-dimensional expression of local cultural characteristics, officials say. Taiwan is trying to build up its cultural and creative industries and, the Tourism Bureau stresses, the fact that there are now festivals throughout the year symbolizes the growth of creativity and vitality in Taiwan."Crook, S. "Domestic Festivals, Global Attraction." August 1, 2009. Taiwan Review. accessed July 31, 2009. http://taiwanreview.nat.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=55591&CtNode=119
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