Phaung Daw U Festival
The Phaung Daw U Festival is a yearly ship procession on Inle Lake in Myanmar in September or October .
description
After the end of the monsoon season, the great festival for the worship of the five Buddha statues by Phaung Daw U takes place. The starting and ending point of the ship procession is the pagoda. For about three weeks, four of the five statues will be sent on a journey to all the important villages and monasteries of Inle Lake. A figure has remained in place since 1965 because it was apparently lost in a shipwreck, but mysteriously reappeared. Every morning the Buddhas are loaded onto the golden royal barge in a solemn ceremony and pulled to their next destination by a long line of festively decorated rowboats. There the figures are presented on an altar in the temple hall and form the center of the colorful hustle and bustle.
For the final highlight of the festival, all boats and numerous worshipers gather in front of the Phaung Daw U Pagoda. The Buddha figures are brought back to their original place, the king barge is parked backwards in their garage. The rowing boats are quite remarkable: they are incredibly long, they can accommodate up to a hundred one-legged rowers in two rows side by side. The boats are decorated with banana leaves, flags and colorful umbrellas and sometimes equipped with musical instruments, more recently also with battery-powered loudspeaker systems.
After the end of the religious ceremonies of the temple festival, boat races using the technique of one-legged rowing take place. The brightly decorated longboats, which pulled the king's barge from monastery to monastery in unison during the festival, now compete in pairs against each other and determine a winner in an opaque competition mode. In addition to speed, beauty also comes into its own.
gallery
Rowboat 
Rowboat 
Barge in Inn Paw Khon 
Arrival at Inn Paw Khon 
Station in Inn Paw Khon 
Boats on the final day 
Parking 
Boat races 
spectator 
Tribute to beauty
Individual evidence
- ↑ Markand et al.: Myanmar. 2006, p. 358.
literature
- Wilhelm Klein: Burma (= Apa Guides. ). Nelles, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-88618-991-0 , p. 245.
- Andrea Markand, Markus Markand, Martin H. Petrich, Volker Klinkmüller: Myanmar. (Burma) (= Stefan Loose Travel Manuals. ). 2nd completely revised edition. DuMont Reiseverlag, Ostfildern 2006, ISBN 3-7701-6147-5 , p. 358.
