King Kong Zi

So the other day it was Confucius's birthday, which like Jesus' birthday in Christianity, is somewhat important to Confucians. On the morning of Confucius (known in Chinese as Kong Zi) Day, which is also called Teacher's Day, they have many ornate ceremonies at Confucian minded temples or institutions across the country. The main ceremony at the Taipei Confucius Temple is nationally-televised but actually takes place at 6 am - 7 am in the morning. In addition, there's 300 tickets sold and the event is popular, so unless you plan on camping outside the temple gates from the night before new-Star-Wars-film style it's not worth getting up so early. What you can do, however, is go to the "dress rehearsal" the afternoon of Confucius Eve, which is what I did with a couple of my Taiwanese amigos (they don't actually call friends amigos here obviously, but I have forgotten the Mandarin word for friend for the time being). My Taiwanese amigos, including one amiga, had never been to a ceremony before either, going to the temple being as exciting for them as church-going in Canada. Strangely enough, the ceremonies in Eastern/Western temples have a lot in common. They both embrace elaborate and colorful costumes, the making of truth through repetition, and the need to make the faithful stand still and quiet for ridiculous lengths of time. There was not a single chair in the building, as a far as I could tell, though the building wasn't so much a building as an enclosed courtyard with a shrine in the middle. It was nice, very Asian looking and quite similar though less ornate than the Buddhist/Daoist temple. It did not look like St. Matthew's Anglican Cathedral. The ceremony itself included a lot of marching back and forth, banging of drums, and the waving of peacock feathers in a fashion eerily similar to that of Palm Sunday. They had a chorus of pipers who play the same tune, and dancers who had mastered the ancient dance of turning around in a circle with palm leaves... I mean peacock feathers. I didn't get to see how it ended, because my Taiwanese friends got bored and tired of standing at attention and wanted to go to the bathroom and get supper. All in all, its not something I will probably go out of my way for too much again, but is good to see at least once, these ancient ceremonies becoming less and less predominant, though I must say it lost some of its Han Dynasty feel with all the digital and video cameras, jean or adidas shorts under the robes, and the planes continuously landing at the neighbouring airport.