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Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Fire dragons and website design

Find some better photos here...
If there's one thing that Hong Kong people seem to love, it's a festival, and almost anything is an excuse for celebration. Some are late additions, like Halloween, which is big here at the moment. Others, like the Fire Dragon dance, seem to have a longer and richer history. I could go into detail, but you're much better off looking at the website, which you will NOT want to miss (how could you not love the Tron aesthetic?)
We seem to miss far too many of these, so we thought we would make the effort to get along and see this Fire Dragon that we'd heard so much about.We turned up pretty close to the advertised time, but perhaps we should have been a bit more skeptical - we had to wait a long time for the Fire Dragon to appear. Still, this was an 'Event', so I suppose they needed some build-up. This consisted mostly of a platform on wheels, which contained a big sign, lots of fairy lights, and a succession of very energetic drummers, old and young, female and male, getting us into the right mood for the night.
It is very much a community effort in Tai Hang, and it looks like everyone who wants to can be involved and find a role. Some of the children got to march around with lanterns on poles, many of the elders of the community marched in a dignified fashion up and down, and the energetic helped put together the fire dragon, which involves thousands upon thousands of sticks of incense. Perhaps it goes without saying that it can be a bit overwhelming being downwind of the dragon, which is partly why it needs to be held up nice and high!
The best of a bad set of photos...
Part of the long delay was the coordinated effort to get those thousands of incense sticks lit and pushed into the body of the dragon - this is impossible to do quickly, but needs to be done quickly enough that the first ones won't have burnt down before the procession ends (actually, I think at one point they stopped and replenished a whole lot that had gone out). Something we hadn't calculated for, was the way at a certain point in the night, when the dragon was almost ready to go, they closed the few pedestrian accessways across the roads that had been open, leaving us stranded within a small block of streets with no way out. This would have been okay, but the crowds were pretty intense, even by Hong Kong standards - you wouldn't have wanted to have a panic attack. So we resigned ourselves to going with the flow, and settled in for another half an hour or so.
The dragon is pretty cool, very very long, and ablaze with incense sticks. I can imagine this would have been much more impressive by comparison back in the 1880s (when it started), before we had all become jaded by neon lighting, CGI imagery, the wonders of smartphones, etc.
More puzzling to my mind, and never explained, was the full 'Scottish' marching band, with kilts, bagpipes, the works. I thought Tai Hang meant 'big water channel', not 'Scotland in the South China sea', but then translation is such a complicated affair. If someone can set me straight on the connection that would be great. I mean, I like bagpipe music, perhaps more than most, it was just hard to see how it fits with all the rest; the incense, the lanterns, the tradition.
When it was all over, we were glad we had gone, but next time we will make a better exit plan!

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