The first day of the festival is celebrated in similar fashion to that of China’s Lunar New Year. Buddhism has since been the region’s predominant belief system. The festival was introduced to southwestern Yunnan Province via Myanmar at the end of the 12th century. It originated in India as a religious rite of the Brahman, or priestly, caste, and later became absorbed into Buddhism. In 2006 the Water-Sprinkling Festival was among the first batch of China’s national intangible cultural heritage to be added to the UNESCO list.Īlso known as the Buddha’s Birthday Festival, the history of this celebration goes back centuries. Other Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia, also share this folk tradition. The event also highlights the joy the people take in music and dance, feasting, and wearing traditional costumes. The festival comprehensively showcases Dai traditional culture and the significance it attaches to water and folklore. The wetter one gets, the more benedictions one may expect. Evening merry-making activities include watching Dai dramas, performing local dances, and flying kongming lanterns. They later take great delight in generously blessing all and sundry with splashes of water and in getting together to talk and compare notes about the past year. People of all ages, dressed in their festival best, take part in the solemn ritual of washing statues of Buddha. This week-long celebration in honor of the Dai Lunar New Year usually falls around mid-April. THE Water-Sprinkling Festival of the Dai ethnic group is the most popularly celebrated rite among the ethnic minorities living in Yunnan Province. Splashing, Dancing and Making Merry at the Dai Water-Sprinkling Festival
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