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Phuket's Amazing Vegetarian Festival
Noise, Colour
and Strange Doings...
Phuket's Vegerarian Festival is
one of the strangest, and most amazing festivals in this festive country
Tourists lying on the beach bathe hot bodies with
cool suntan oil. In the streets, Chinese celebrants bathe cool bodies in hot
oil. The former is, of course, commonplace, but the latter is bizarre, one
of a number of fearsome feats of self-mortification performed by devotees
during Phuket’s annual Vegetarian Festival.
  
For nine days in October the air of tropical torpor
is shaken off and Phuket explodes into noisy scenes that are thrilling,
astonishing, colourful, crowded - anything but relaxing. The celebration of
the biggest event in the island’s festive calendar gives a whole new
perspective on this particular island paradise.
By far the largest of Phuket’s ethnic minorities are the Chinese, who
migrated from neighbouring Malaysia as well as China itself in the 19th
century. Adept in trade and attracted by a revitalized tin mining industry,
they had enormous impact and have dominated much of Phuket’s development.
  
Most dramatic of these enduring Chinese influences on the cultural fabric is
the annual Vegetarian Festival, celebrated in a style unseen elsewhere in
Thailand. Held in the ninth lunar month (usually in October), this amazing
affair blends religious devotion, ritual, merry-making and awesome displays
of supernatural powers. It is essentially Chinese in origin and practice but
has drawn on various other cultural influences - not least the Thai passion
for any festival — to become a distinctively Phuket pageant.
Today the nine-day Vegetarian Festival is honoured at the island’s five main
Chinese temples with the biggest celebrations seen at Jui Tui Temple, Bang
Neow Temple (both in Phuket Town) and at the original site of Kathu Temple.
Images of the Nine Emperor Gods are given offerings of vegetarian food and
paraded through the town with noisy fanfare, while devotees show the power
of the spirit over the flesh by piecing their cheeks and tongues with sharp
skewers, and performing other daring feats of self-mortification. Such
astonishing displays subjecting the body to torment similarly mark other
event over the nine days. The festival ends with a gala night of fireworks
as the entire town turns out to give an incredible raucous farewell to the
towns guardian spirit idols.
  
A large percentage of restaurants also turn vegetarian for ten days, and
indicate this with yellow flags. Phuket is then awash in yellow flags and
the white of abstinence.
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