Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance (Mid-Autumn)

Tai Hang was originally a Hakka village where, as legend has it, a plague broke out in 1880; villagers built a dragon studded with burning incense and paraded it for three days and nights around Mid-Autumn to drive off the pestilence, after which the plague subsided, and the rite has been repeated every year since, now over a century old. The Mid-Autumn Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance entered the third national ICH list in 2011.

The fire dragon stretches over sixty metres, its frame of bamboo and rope wound thick with pearl grass and studded with tens of thousands of incense sticks, carried by nearly three hundred men to the beat of gongs and drums through the streets of Tai Hang, the flickering incense and wreathing smoke making a magnificent spectacle.

The Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance carries the collective memory and plague-warding faith of a Hakka village and is among Hong Kong's most representative festival rites; in 2019 it was recognised as an outstanding practice case among national ICH items.

Held each year around Mid-Autumn in the Tai Hang area of Hong Kong Island.