Thousands in Taiwan and China celebrate the Lantern Festival with high hopes and rice dumplings

NEW TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Thousands in Taiwan and China celebrated the Lantern Festival on Wednesday by releasing paper lanterns into the night sky, visiting light installations and snacking on glutinous rice dumplings.

The holiday marks the end of the Lunar New Year period and is celebrated annually on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar calendar.

At the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival in northern Taiwan, thousands lined up in the rain to light up and observe wish lanterns. Among them were Mae Alegonero and Shine Ceralvo, friends from the Philippines who work in central Taiwan. They decided to join the event after seeing images of the floating lanterns trending on TikTok.

“You experience this once in a lifetime,” Alegonero said, as she sheltered under an umbrella with her friend and waited for the festivities to begin.

Some visitors came from as far as Europe and Latin America to witness in person the iconic images of paper lanterns filling the night sky.

Villagers in Taiwan started using paper lanterns more than a century ago to signify to others it was safe to return after bandits raided their communities. Today, the lanterns carry hopes of peace and prosperity in the New Year.

For Charlotte Cadinot, an exchange student from France, the fascination with wish lanterns started when she watched the Disney movie “Tangled,” which features a scene where Princess Rapunzel and her beau wish upon lanterns floating above a lake.

Cadinot and her boyfriend, Remi Delmas, recreated that scene to an extent when they wrote their own common wish on a lantern before releasing it into the sky.

A total of nine waves of lantern releases were interspersed with music and dance performances as part of the festival. The stars of the show were a pair of 12-foot (3.6 meters) pink and golden snake-shaped lanterns, in a nod to the Year of the Snake.

People in China also celebrated the Lantern Festival, although no officially-organized event there sees the release of large amounts of paper lanterns.

Instead, people lined up for glutinous rice dumplings – the festival’s most sought-after snack – and visited light shows across the city. The largest among them, at the Beijing Garden Expo Park, in the city’s suburbs, displayed more than 10,000 installations of various sizes and designs.

Some installations were up to 60 feet (18 meters) tall and depicted everything from cultural landmarks to traditional symbols such as the God of Fortune, dragons and phoenixes to modern interpretations such as a cyberpunk-style Beijing opera headdress.

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Associated Press video producer Caroline Chen in Beijing contributed to this report.