villagers raise wooden signs as they march past some Christmas flowers in front of a huge
bamboo theater with traditional decorations during the Tai Ping Ching Jiu festival at Lam Tsuen
village in Hong Kong.
HONG KONG— In a rural community far from Hong Kong’s hustle and bustle and towering skyscrapers, villagers hold one of the southern Chinese city’s rare and colorful local festivals.
Residents gather in the village of Lam Tsuen for the dayslong Tai Ping Ching Jiu festival. Participants give thanks to Taoist deities like Tin Hau for abundant harvests and pray for peace.
Organizers spend lavishly on the celebration, erecting a massive temporary bamboo theatre for traditional Cantonese Opera performances.
Other highlights include lion dances, vegetarian feasts and the burning of life-size paper effigies of animals like horses for luck.
On the final day, meat is once again allowed to mark the ritual’s close, so revelers enjoy delicacies like roast suckling pig.
The event is so popular that even villagers who have emigrated overseas return home to join in the festivities.
The festival, also known as Da Jiao, is held in other agrarian villages across Hong Kong’s outlying New Territories at varying intervals. It was also once common in parts of neighboring Guangdong province in mainland China until the Communist Party took power, when such traditions were suppressed by the country’s atheist leaders, who viewed them as feudal superstition.