Taitung Bombing Master Handan Culture Festival

Matching the explosiveness of the Yanshui spectacle is the Bombing Master Handan pageant, held in Taitung City. This is perhaps the most important annual folk-religion event on Taiwan’s East Coast, and certainly the most important in Taitung City. During the city’s Lantern Festival bash, brave young men representing Master (sometimes “Lord”) Handan are paraded through the streets on a bamboo throne, and are blasted relentlessly with bricks of firecrackers by the thousands of onlookers they pass. These daredevil fellows wear nothing but red shorts, a red-and-yellow headdress, goggles, and a bandana pulled up over the mouth.

Folk belief is that the more firecrackers you throw, the greater fortune is enjoyed in the coming year. Residents wait outside homes and employees outside businesses for the deity to pass, as do great throngs of Taiwanese from elsewhere, and as do ever larger numbers of tourists from overseas as the reputation of the event has spread offshore.

Where: Taitung City

When: 15th Lunar January