TiT Festivals:Offerings for Hungry Ghosts

Offerings for Hungry Ghosts

By Cliff Vost Photos by Sung Chih-hsiung

Yilan county in northeast Taiwan has long been known as a bastion of Taiwanese culture. Nestled among high mountains and cradled by the narrow Lanyang Plain which stretches along the Pacific Ocean to the east, the very inaccessibility of Yilan has meant that traditions passed down over hundreds of years have been preserved here.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the first settlement of Han Chinese in Yilan. To celebrate this bicentennial, a series of festivals has been held throughout the year. One of the most recent of these held in Toucheng--the first town ever built in Yilan--on September 13, 1996, coincided with the last day of the seventh lunar month, which the Chinese call "Ghost Month." This colorful and noisy festival incorporates the Buddhist ceremony of putu--the deliverance of the spirits of the dead, or the "hungry ghost" festival.

The festival climaxes with a rite known as "chiang ku"--a contest that involves grabbing offerings of meat and rice dumplings from a group of tall bamboo towers atop a lofty platform. This breathtaking and dangerous feat takes place during the last hour of the six-day festival, on the last day of Ghost Month, when the gates of Hades close and all the hungry ghosts return to the underworld, there to stay until they are released again next year. Injuries and deaths forced the

competition to close for 43 years; it was resumed in 1991, with nets and sand bags deployed underneath the platform for safety. Although chiang-ku is popular all over Taiwan, the one practiced in Yilan has a history of over 170 years and is undoubtedly the grandest and most spectacular of them all.

The day before the competition, 13 clusters of bamboo poles, tied together with tough bamboo skin and hemp rope, and decorated with red and yellow flags, as well as lights to attract the ghosts, were hoisted onto a platform with cranes. The poles, which measure around 16 meters in height, are hung with offerings for the ghosts and are topped by a flag. Competitors fight their way up 13 meters to the platform before tackling the clusters of bamboo, which are lathered with beef tallow to make climbing difficult, to reach and saw off their prize--the flag.

To the sound of gongs and drums, 12 teams of eight men each form human pyramids in their effort to make their way up the slippery legs of the platform. Each man is equipped with just two short plaits of hemp rope and a saw. As they move up the platform in their race to be first to reach the top flag, the men throw down the bundles of offerings, which include chicken, pork,

rice dumplings (tsungtzu), and rice cakes to the roaring crowd below. This year, winner Lin Yi-chung of the Lungtan team took just six minutes to reach the platform and then a further 11 minutes to saw down the first flag. The whole fray was over in forty minutes.

Here the lights used to call the spirits of the hungry ghosts to the festival are lit. It is said that the higher the lantern, the greater the number of ghosts that will gather; so, to assure that the ghosts on the scene get enough to eat, the organizers make sure the lantern isn't elevated too high.