Written by Matt Gibson / Translated by: 羅文穗

In October I attended my first Taiwanese boat burning in Dong Gang, Pingtung County.  I had promised Ryan, the publisher of Highway 11, a spectacular photo essay about the tri-annual folk ceremony.  I almost completely screwed it up.  Fortunately, in the end I came away with a good set of pictures, which should be, if everything went as planned, printed in the magazine with this article.

Afterwards I realized that almost missing the event that you’re supposed to cover, and then pulling your ass out of the fire, is a valuable skill.  So, I decided to write step-by-step instructions about how to go after an article like a total moron and emerge victorious.

Step 1

Wait until two days before the festival to start doing research.  Then, in desperation, use information from completely unreliable sources like expatriate discussion forums (Forumosa.com for example) where any screwball foreigner can post anything he wants, such as misleading information saying that the Wang Yeh boat will be burned on Saturday night, when it will in fact be burned on Friday night.

Step 2

Get drunk on Thursday instead of charging your camera and clearing the pictures from your memory cards.  Then wait until 10 pm on Friday to stuff your uncharged camera, flash, and memory cards into your camera bag.  

Step 3

Spend two hours at a friend’s going away party and leave Tainan at 12 pm. Drive three hours to Donggang.  Roll into town at 3 am dead tired. 

Step 4

Learn from a group of foreigners at 7-11 that the boat is actually being burned in two hours.

Step 5

Shout curse words and kick your motorcycle until the group nervously retreats.

Step 6

Buy batteries for your camera’s battery pack, which was made for emergencies just like this one, but also causes some kind of electrical problem that makes your camera freeze sporadically, forcing you to constantly restart it, which makes you want to hurtle it at a brick wall.

Step 7

Indiscriminately erase your memory cards, losing timeless mementos, such as the picture of the giant spider in your bathroom, the Taiwanese butcher with two fingers, and the photos from that night at the love motel with the Taiwanese pop singer.

Step 8

Give some money to the Chinese deity with the enormous red head that’s walking the streets begging.  Follow him trying to photograph him, even though he doesn’t want to be photographed, because that’s the only reason you gave him money in the first place.

Step 9

Find the ghost boat on the beach surrounded by thousands of people.  Push your way to the front of the crowd repeatedly shooting pictures using your oversized camera flash, which blinds everyone within three meters, and draws innumerable dirty looks.

Step 10

Stand in the ridiculously tightly packed crowd sweating, and rubbing up against all the other sweaty people, for nearly two hours.  Then, as soon as they set the boat on fire, rush across the security lines to get the best angle.

Step 11

Pretend you don’t speak Chinese. Use body language to reassure the security guards that it was an accident and that you won’t try it again.

Step 12

When the boat really gets blazing, (and it does get a blazin’—it’s a 15 ton wooden boat sitting on a mountain of ghost money), stay close despite the blistering heat and burning ghost money flying through the air.

Step 13

Put out the burning ghost money that landed on your arm.  Continue shooting.  Shake the burning ghost money off your leg.  Curse.  Put your leg in the ocean.

Step 14

Keep shooting until you’ve filled both of your 8-gigabyte cards, then leave. Realize that you have no idea where you parked.  Wander the streets looking for your motorcycle.

Step 15

Drive three hours home. Sleep all day.  

Step 16

Write a cultural essay to accompany the photographs in the magazine.

Step 17

On the day of the deadline, decide that the essay sucks and try to write a witty instructional style article that actually tells people about your folly-ridden trip to the Wang Yeh Burning Boat festival. 

The Wang Yeah Boat Burning Festival

The Wang Yeh boat burning festival is a 300-year-old tradition, the roots of which stretch back more than a millennium.  Wang Yeh, or Royal Lords, are Chinese folk dieties.  There are hundreds of Wang Yeh, including well-known gods like Koxinga and Mazu.  During this festival five Wang Yeh are called down from heaven.   When they come to earth they reside in five tablets.  The tablets go through several rituals, including being carried over burning embers by devotees, during which they collect evil, disease spreading spirits.  The tablets are later placed on a massive boat sitting atop a mountain of ghost money, which is set alight, and carries the Wang Yeh, along with the evil spirits, back to the heavens.

The Dying Art of Boat Building

It used to be common for Wang Yeh boats to be constructed from bamboo and paper.  These paper boats, which measured up to 100m long, were burned in Donggang up until 1974, when competition between rival temples pushed devotees to build more prestigious wooden boats.
This year’s Wang Yeh boat was about 13.8m long, 3.65m wide and made of Vietnamese juniper wood.  Despite the fact all work was done by volunteers, the boat’s construction cost NT$6.6 million, a 10% increase over last year. 

Unfortunately, the team that built this year’s boat is aging.  Its youngest member is in his 50s, and, in a world of fiberglass and steel, few young people are eager to learn outdated wooden boat building skills.

Since tradition demands that the Wang Yeh boat is built by volunteers (not purchased) the temple may be forced to return to burning paper boats sometime in the next few decades, not for a lack of money, but because of the death of this centuries-old craft.