Qualla: Yanshuei District

Yanshuei District: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Every year, fifteen days after the Lunar New Year, the people of Yanshuei put on helmets, layer themselves in fireproof clothing, and walk toward the rockets. This is not recklessness. It is devotion. The Beehive Fireworks Festival — called Fengpao — sends thousands of bottle rockets arcing outward from iron-and-wood launcher frames into the night sky and, frequently, into the crowd itself. Being struck is considered good fortune. The more hits, the better the year ahead. Spectators who understand this lean in. Those who do not are turned away.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Yanshuei District: A Port Town That Lost Its Harbor

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 阿文, CC BY 3.0. Yanshuei's original identity was maritime. Known in earlier centuries by its Hokkien name — roughly transliterated as Goat-tin-kang — it was one of the five most important port towns in Taiwan, a status it carried through the Qing period and into the Japanese colonial era. That s...

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Image: 阿文 | CC BY 3.0

Yanshuei District: The Epidemic Behind the Festival

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The Beehive Festival did not begin as entertainment. Around 1875, near the end of Qing-era rule in Taiwan, a cholera epidemic broke out in Yanshuei and lasted for more than twenty years. Disease of that duration and that lethality left communities desperate for any remedy. The su...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Yanshuei District: The Mechanics of the Beehive

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The launchers that give the festival its name are extraordinary objects. Thousands of bottle rockets are arranged row upon row in iron-and-wooden frameworks — the setup resembling, in the dim light before ignition, a giant beehive packed with coiled energy. When the frame is lit,...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Yanshuei District: Contested and Continuing

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mk2010, CC BY-SA 4.0. Spectators have been injured. Moves to restrict or ban the festival have been made. It continues anyway. The persistence of Fengpao reflects something about Yanshuei's relationship with its own history — a community that remembers what the epidemic took and what the ritual gave b...

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Image: Mk2010 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Yanshuei District: A District Finding New Purposes

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. Yanshuei covers 52.25 square kilometers and is home to roughly 24,000 people. The district became part of Tainan City in December 2010, when Tainan County was merged with Tainan City — an administrative consolidation that connected this former port town to the resources of one of...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0