Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival: Wishes, Railway Towns and Lunar New Year

Once a year, on the fifteenth night of the Lunar New Year, the narrow valley around Pingxi fills with light that has nothing to do with electricity. Paper lanterns, each carrying a wish written by hand, rise together over the mountains in waves of a hundred or more. The custom began as something far more practical than a spectacle — a signal fire for villagers hiding from bandits in the hills above a coal-mining line. Odyssey’s Taiwan Lantern Festival tour builds its second day around this evening, pairing it with the old gold-mining lanes of Chiufen earlier in the day.

Signal fires in the mountains

The sky lantern is a simple thing: a frame of thin bamboo wrapped in oiled rice paper, with an open base that holds a small fuel cell. Light the fuel, and the rising hot air lifts the whole lantern into the sky, exactly as it lifts a hot air balloon. Settlers from southern China brought the design to the mountains above what is now New Taipei City during the Qing dynasty, and the terrain gave it an unusual second life. Pingxi’s valleys were isolated and, by the mid-nineteenth century, prone to bandit raids. When trouble came, villagers who had fled into the hills would wait for it to pass, then send a lantern up over the settlement as an all-clear signal to those still in hiding — light as a message, long before anyone thought of it as a festival.

That practical signal became a form of prayer sometime after, and by the twentieth century locals were writing wishes on the paper before release rather than simple news. The organised public festival is much newer: New Taipei’s tourism authorities established it in 1999, built around the same custom and the same valley, timed to the first full moon of the lunar calendar — the night that closes the fifteen days of Lunar New Year celebrations across Taiwan and gives the wider Taiwan Lantern Festival its name.

From coal line to lantern line

Pingxi and its neighbouring town of Shifen sit on the Pingxi Line, a narrow branch railway built in 1918 to carry coal out of the district’s mountainside mines. The mines closed decades ago, but the single-track line survived by becoming a tourist attraction in its own right: at Shifen in particular, the platform runs so close to the row of shops and homes on Old Street that a passing train seems to graze the awnings. That railway heritage is a big part of why lantern releases happen here and nowhere else in Taiwan — the government permits them only in Pingxi District, partly because the tradition genuinely belongs to this valley, and partly because the surrounding mountains and the absence of low-flying air traffic make it one of the few places a mass release can be managed safely.

On the tour itinerary, the Pingxi evening follows a morning in Chiufen and Jinguashi, the neighbouring gold-mining towns whose steep, lantern-strung lanes tell a related but separate story about the same period of Taiwan’s mining history. Seeing both in a single day gives a clearer picture of this corner of New Taipei City than either visit does alone — old industry giving way, in both cases, to a slower kind of tourism built on atmosphere rather than extraction.

How much walking does a Pingxi and Shifen day involve?

Expect three to five hours of activity across the day, in keeping with the tour’s Level 2 — Moderate rating, mostly on paved streets and railway platforms rather than trail. The walk along Shifen’s Old Street runs directly beside the working railway line, so the path narrows and the ground is uneven in places where the track crosses it; a hand free of heavy bags is worth having. Pingxi itself sits on a hillside, and moving between the old street, the release area and the railway station involves a mix of gentle slopes and some steps. Festival evenings bring genuine crowds, and the walking pace on Old Street slows to match the density of the crowd rather than your own stride, particularly in the hour before a mass release.

When does the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival actually take place?

The festival is fixed to the lunar calendar rather than a set date on the Western one, which is why it shifts by several weeks from year to year — it falls on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the traditional close of Lunar New Year, and typically lands somewhere between late January and early March. In recent years the organised public festival has run across two dates roughly a week apart, alternating between a main site near Pingxi Junior High School and a second site at Shifen, each with several timed release sessions through the evening rather than a single free-for-all. Exact dates, sites and session times are set by New Taipei City’s tourism authority a few months ahead and are confirmed against the current year’s programme before each departure.

Writing a wish, letting it go

The lanterns sold in Pingxi and Shifen for everyday release — as opposed to the festival’s larger organised sessions — are usually divided into four coloured panels, and tradition assigns each panel to a different kind of wish: health, wealth, love and career are the most common groupings, though shopkeepers vary the exact wording. Visitors write in whichever language they like, in ink or brush, sometimes alongside a hand-drawn image. The custom translates easily across languages and backgrounds precisely because the gesture — write it down, send it up, watch it go — needs no explanation once you’re standing in the crowd doing it alongside everyone else.

Does everyone get to release their own lantern?

There are two distinct experiences on offer here, and it’s worth knowing the difference before the evening arrives. Individual lanterns are sold year-round from shops along Shifen’s Old Street and released, a handful at a time, directly over the railway tracks between passing trains — this is the version most visitors picture, and it’s available to anyone who buys one on the day. The organised festival sessions are a different scale entirely: coordinated mass releases of a hundred or more lanterns at once, run to a schedule, usually requiring a free ticket collected earlier in the day.

What happens to the lanterns once they’ve gone up?

It’s a fair question, and one worth asking before you write a wish and send it skyward. The lanterns themselves are rice paper and thin bamboo, materials chosen to burn down and biodegrade rather than persist, and since the New Taipei City government began formally managing releases in the 1990s, organised events have come with coordinated recovery efforts in the surrounding hills and waterways once the fuel cells burn out. That said, the custom has drawn genuine environmental criticism over the decades — spent frames don’t always make it back to a bin — and it’s part of why releases are restricted to Pingxi District rather than permitted more widely across Taiwan. Travelling with a small group on an organised festival date, rather than buying a lantern independently on a quiet afternoon, means your release happens within that managed system rather than outside it.

One festival, several nights

Pingxi is the best-known lantern moment on this itinerary, but not the only one. The same tour later spends an evening at Taipei’s Raohe Night Market, where lanterns and temple lights mark the festival in an entirely different register — dense, urban, built around food stalls and a temple procession rather than open mountain sky. Toward the end of the trip, the route also takes in the Taoyuan Lantern Festival, a large public art event held on the final night of the Lunar New Year period in a different city altogether. Seeing all three across the same eleven days is a useful reminder that “the Lantern Festival” isn’t a single event so much as a shared date that different Taiwanese communities mark in their own way. For broader planning questions — visas, currency, the best time of year to visit generally — Odyssey’s Questions about Taiwan guide covers the ground this article doesn’t need to repeat.

What stays with most travellers, in the end, isn’t the history or the logistics but the few minutes themselves: a lantern held steady while the fuel catches, a wish written by hand, and then the quiet as it lifts away over a valley that’s been sending signals into that same sky for well over a century. Odyssey’s Taiwan Lantern Festival tour builds an entire day around reaching that moment well prepared and at an unhurried pace, with a small group and a Program Leader who knows exactly where to stand.