It would be a stretch to say that anyone was happy about the weather when the MyTaiwanTour team – along with a couple of friends from the local expat community – reached Pingxi for our lantern cleanup hike. Though it had merely been cool and overcast when we left Taipei, which some might call perfect hiking weather, when we crossed the mountain to Pingxi the rain was coming down pretty heavily.
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The Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival is one of the most popular things to do in Taiwan. Each day, hundreds of visitors visit northern Taiwan’s Pingxi township to take part in the creation, decoration and launching of DIY Sky Lanterns. Once part of a broader celebration held specifically as part of the greater Lunar New Year festival, in recent years the festival has morphed into more of a destination based activity rather than an annual festival available only at certain times during the year. Launching a sky lantern with a few thoughts and prayers has become (like a night market stroll, dumplings at Din Tai Fung or visit to the National Palace Museum) a Taiwan bucket list experience.
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Picture dozens of traditional Chinese lanterns, angels of flame and light, each bearing individual wishes skyward into the heavens. That’s Pingxi, a small town in Taiwan on most evenings of the year.
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Today’s excursion brings us to the charming towns of Pingxi (平溪) and Shifen (十份). Located in Taiwan’s Northeast about an hour from Taipei, both are former Japanese era coal mining towns that today offer rich histories, quaint streets offering a good feel for old Taiwan, and of course, great street food.
Read MoreThe quaint old village of Pingxi (平溪), today officially the center of New Taipei City’s rural Pingxi District, is the penultimate station on the Pingxi Branch Railway Line, built early in the last century to transport coal mined in the surrounding hills. After coal mining in the Pingxi Valley ceased a few decades ago, the railway line escaped closure partly because it was a vital link with the outside world, but also because the area was becoming an increasingly popular tourist attraction
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