The story
Matsu Blue Tears Festival in Matsu Islands
Each spring, typically April through June, Lienchiang County promotes a Blue Tears tourism season across the Matsu Islands, when bioluminescent plankton light up the surf and coastline a vivid blue after dark; county tourism authorities market the phenomenon under festival-style branding, though it is a natural seasonal event rather than a fixed-program cultural festival.
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the Matsu Islands existed in the Taiwanese public imagination almost entirely as a military frontline, a heavily garrisoned outpost sitting closer to mainland China's Fujian coast than to Taiwan itself, kept under martial law and largely closed to civilian visitors until restrictions lifted in 1992.