The Dai people celebrate the Water-Splashing festival in around mid-April.
Around the age of seven or eight, Dai boys may become ‘keyong,’ or novices, and are sent to learn Buddhist doctrine before they become a ‘panan’ (child monk). Most return to secular life aged around 17 or 18 and they will then get married.
The Water-Splashing Festival is the Dai calendar’s New Year and is held in the last ten days of the sixth Dai month or early in the seventh. The festival usually lasts between three and five days.
The legend goes that there was once a demon of fire who brought pain and suffering to the people and forced seven women to marry him. However, these women were brave enough to kill the demon; the youngest and most daring strangled him with his own hair. His head fell off and rolled around in flames, burning whatever it rolled over. In order to control the fire, each of the women held the head for one year, at the end of which the locals would splash water over her to wash off the blood and dirt as well as refreshing her. This is re-enacted now to commemorate the bravery of these women.
The festival’s first day is New Year’s Eve. This is when the ‘ascending high’ competition and dragon boat races take place. Ascending high are hand-made rockets, which are bamboo poles filled with gunpowder and then fired into the sky, leaving a trail of smoke.
On the second day, people rest, stay at home or go into the mountains to hunt. It celebrates no one and the New Year is not commemorated, either.
The ‘king of days’ is the third day of the festival, when people dress up to go for prayers at the temple to pray for good luck, fortune and more children. In the afternoon, Buddha statues are splashed with water by women and then everyone else gets splashed, as well.
The ‘civilised’ way to do this is to dip flowers in water and sprinkle one another in blessing. The ‘violent’ way involves using basins and buckets to splash each other. The more water is splashed on a person, the luckier and happier they will be the following year. The festival winds down in the evening when people sing, dance and drink late into the night.
More recent activities at the festival include exchanging gifts, going to amusement parks, cockfighting and the setting free of balloons.
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