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Keelung Mid-Summer Ghost Festival in Keelung
Keelung's Zhongyuan Festival, held throughout the seventh lunar month known across Chinese culture as Ghost Month, is one of Taiwan's most important folk religious events, culminating in a water lantern parade through the harbor city and the release of lit lanterns into Keelung Harbour to guide wandering spirits. Organized on a rotating basis among Keelung's historic surname clan associations, the festival has roots in nineteenth-century efforts to reconcile early settler conflict.
In the seventh month of the lunar calendar, when Chinese folk tradition holds that a gate between the world of the living and the world of spirits stands open, the port city of Keelung on Taiwan's northern coast stages one of the island's most elaborate and historically layered Ghost Month observances.