Meinong Farmers' Festival Year-End Banquet: Two Thousand Farmers Worship the Great Emperor Shennong, Giving Thanks to Heaven and Earth and Themselves

As the year draws to a close, every industry holds its year-end banquet. Big electronics firms give away cars and stocks to their employees, large corporations invite popular celebrities to perform one after another, and once the year-end banquet season arrives, employees become the ones whom the big bosses reward and thank. So what about farmers? Farmers who have toiled between heaven and earth for a whole year have no boss and no company. How do they spend their year-end banquet?

In Meinong, Kaohsiung, the local farmers' association has held a Farmers' Festival year-end banquet for eight consecutive years. The date is the Saturday after the Start of Spring and before the Lunar New Year, and the venue is in front of the Wugu Temple, which symbolizes traditional agriculture. Every year more than 150 tables are set, with nearly two thousand farmers taking part, making it the largest farmers' year-end banquet of any rural area in Taiwan, China.

Before the meal begins, every farmer holds a stick of incense to worship heaven and the gods, and the atmosphere is grand and lively, so much so that even the gods seem to go wild along with it!