Thadingyut Festival at Hsipaw, Northern Shan State.

 Every year in October Hsipaw has a festival at which each of the villages in Northern Shan State brings in trucks loaded with presents to give away at the monasteries. This year 500 villages donated 500 truck-loads. This is a serious size festival.  

Heading the procession was a nagadaw dressed in white. Nagadaws are the human representation of nats, which are part of the all important and very much alive spirit world of Myanmar. Bo Bo Gyi is the nat that represents the town of Hsipaw. He ensures that everything at the festival will go smoothly. Everyone will be happy: singing and dancing with no fighting to spoil the show. We were particularly pleased to see Palaung villagers wearing their festival finery.

 Some floats comprised big, modern trucks, others were smaller and less modern, and some were ancient tractors with no bonnets. Often a man had to get down to wind up the engine, cranking it into life! Every float blared music, some came from loudspeakers and some had on board traditional musicians beating drums and clashing cymbals. Tall bamboo screens carrying the presents stood on the floats giving the population of Hsipaw an idea of all that the villagers were giving to the monasteries. Items on the screens comprised: umbrellas, crockery, clocks, electric fans, buckets, food carriers, furry brown cushion covers, pink plastic drawer dividers and huge towels bearing pictures of snarling tigers. Several trucks had notices announcing how many kyat their village was donating and one truck bore a zedi built entirely of 1,000 kyat notes! All bore pictures of the Buddha.

These huge screens would be taken off the trucks later at the pagoda in Hsipaw.

A float came by throbbing with music. Teenage boys in jeans, white shirts and incongruously long black ties bounced up and down keeping the beat. Other young boys favoured elasticated camouflage pants so tight they were the exact opposite of the baggy Shan pants the older generation wore.

The procession was static for a while. Each truck was given a number in Hsipaw denoting their village. This evening they would receive a number (pulled out by lucky draw) denoting the monastery to which their gifts would go and to which, wherever it was, they had to deliver them. The procession rolled on again.

Trucks had started moving this morning at 10.00 am and will not finish until around mid-night. After this, one imagines the singers, dancers, drivers and movers of the bamboo screens will all collapse with fatigue. Fortunately, as this is the time of Thadingyut, the Festival of Light, the next day is a holiday giving everyone time to recover.