2020 Puji Temple Lantern Festival in Fucheng Lights Up, Tainan Mayor Huang Weizhe Invites Everyone to Admire the Lanterns

The "Fucheng Puji Temple Lantern Festival" is a major annual event in Tainan, and a must-visit itinerary that attracts domestic and international tourists. This year it will run romantically from January 19 to February 15. Mayor Huang Weizhe, in addition to personally presiding over the lighting ceremony last night (the 19th), also invited everyone to come to Puji Temple on 2/15 to pray for blessings and admire the painted lanterns.

Mayor Huang Weizhe stated that the Fucheng Puji Temple Lantern Festival, now in its 8th year, is mainly organized and funded by the private sector. Starting this year, both the central and local governments have provided subsidies, hoping to attract more participation from the public by example, with enterprises contributing funds, and even elementary and junior high school students, and artists contributing their efforts. Everyone working together to make the Puji Temple Lantern Festival more successful and better, so that more people from home and abroad, domestic and international, can participate together. This is also a major event for the people of Taiwan.

The Tainan City Government Tourism Bureau stated that the spectacular sight of over a thousand lanterns covering the temple courtyard and Guohua Street is magnificent. Various beautiful images are spread through social media platforms such as Facebook and IG, and the Puji Temple Lantern Festival has become one of the reasons attracting domestic and international tourists to visit Tainan during the Spring Festival, and can be called the pride of Tainan. In recent years, the Tourism Bureau has also continued to promote traditional lantern festival activities in Tainan such as Puji Temple abroad. In particular, Guohua Street is lined with Tainan snacks, and surrounding attractions including Hai'an Road, Zhengxing Street, and Shennong Street are all extremely popular with young tourists, making it very suitable for everyone to come and stroll around Tainan together.

This year's main lantern of the festival was created by emerging artist Lin Jianzhi from the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts. In 2020, it happens to be the turn of the rat, the first of the twelve Chinese zodiac signs, to take charge. Therefore, the author used the image and styling of a beckoning cat to design and produce this year's main lantern, the "Wealth-Beckoning Rat." Paired with the illumination of fluorescent lights, it creates an even more colorful and joyful effect. It is hoped that everyone who comes to the Puji Temple Lantern Festival, with the blessing of the Wealth-Beckoning Rat, will have everything go smoothly in the new year, with wealth rolling in endlessly.