THE NINE-DAY Nine Emperor Gods Festival, a Taoist ritual widely observed in Southeast Asia, features prominently in the tourist calendar of the Buddhist island of Phuket, Thailand.

The annual festival, stretching from the first to the ninth day of the Ninth Moon in the lunar calendar, is punctuated with strict abstinence of non-vegetarian diet among the devotees. That may be the reason Nine Emperor Gods festival is known in Thai as the Tesagan Gin, or simply, the Vegetarian Festival.

 

 

This year, the festival lasted from October 18 through 26. It was a carnival-like reception in Phuket, where about 35 percent of the population is Chinese.

Two colours ornamented the touristic island throughout the festival – white and yellow.

 

 

Those who participate in the festival, besides observing the strict vegetarian diet, will dress all in white. Banners and flags denoting the observance are presented in yellow materials, caligraphed in red letterings. Restaurants and make-shift food stalls adopt the yellow-red regime to indicate their offerings are compliant with the vegetarian practice.

Our tour guide mentioned that much of the ritualistic activities that signify the fulfilment of vows are conducted on the fifth and sixth days of the festival. It involves blessing-seeking by the devotees, blessing-giving by the deities through mediums in trance. Significantly, there is also redemption of vows in the form of mortification of the flesh by piercing the body, tongue or cheeks with skewers that are similar to the rituals inherent in the Indian festival of Thaipusam.

The only difference in such bodily mortification in Phuket is that the skewers often carry swords, banners, machine guns, table lamps, flowers and even bicycles.

 

 

By night, there are other forms of rituals at the the temples during the festival, like firewalking, blade-ladder climbing and boiling-oil bathing.

Landing in Phuket on the last day of the festival, I was showered with the opportunity to observe the grand send-off for the Nine Emperor Gods.

It was held at the city square of Phuket around 10pm. Mediums in trance representing the deities from 14 temples on the island took their cue for the finale. Thousands of devotees in white lined the narrow roads, with hundreds taking the march trailing the dieties.

 

 

A peculiar scene uniquely Phuket is the incessant rounds of fire-crackers that were let off for the entire procession that lasted almost three hours. Some of the fire-crackers were launched onto the path of the deities and the follower-devotees.

It was a risky sojourn as I joined many onlookers to only become targets of these bazookas of fire-crackers aimed at people who crossed roads. But it was fun and an eye-opener even for a person residing in this part of the world.

 

[ MORE, a set of 16 pictures are available on my Flickr. It was a 1-camera 1-lens outing that had put Nikon D3 and Sigma F/1.4 50mm to severe tests on the lens' optical properties and thebody's noise threshold. ]