《TAIPEI TIMES》 Mayor Ko directs marching band as he opens Taipei’s nine-day lantern festival

By Lee I-chia / Staff reporter

This year’s Taipei Lantern Festival was officially launched at the plaza in front of the city’s Ximen MRT Station in the Ximending （西門町） shopping district yesterday evening.

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The nine-day lantern exhibition in western Taipei, which stretches from the city’s North Gate （北門） to Zhonghua Road Sec 1 and Ximending, is to be lit between 7pm and 9:30pm on weekdays and from 7pm to 10pm on weekends.

The main lantern, titled Happy Magical Dogs, is of three Taiwanese dogs holding hands and symbolizes “going forward, going together and going into the future.” A lantern show is performed every 30 minutes, with each night’s last show starting five minutes earlier.

The opening ceremony began at 6:30pm yesterday with a performance by Formosa Circus Art, followed by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je （柯文哲） leading marching band Girls Nine, holding a baton and guiding its nine members as they walked through the crowd from the main lantern to the main stage.

Ko said it is the second year that the city’s lantern festival has been held in western Taipei, and with renovations to nearby historical buildings and the North Gate having been completed this year, he hoped that visitors could enjoy the historical sites during the day, visit the lantern festival at night, shop in the commercial shopping district and pick up “the feeling of happiness” that the festival hopes to convey.

Ko and invited guests lit the main lantern by dumping buckets of dog food into a large treasure bowl, symbolizing feeding the “happy magical dogs” and giving them energy.

A special feature of this year’s main lantern is that the LED screens on its round base display photographs of stray dogs from the city’s animal shelters, which were provided by the Animal Protection Office, and people interested in adopting the dogs can scan the QR code shown on the screen to access further information.

The screens are to also display images created by Beats on Eyes — a platform for music and visual design — that fit the themes of “love” and “happiness,” symbolizing people getting together and living happily in the international city that is Taipei, despite different languages and cultural backgrounds.

The Taipei Police Department said it has erected vehicle barriers at nearby intersections to prevent intentional crashes and it would carry out searches with explosive-detection dogs throughout the event.

新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES