Thursday, September 5, 2013

Boar Racing Festival

This past week we celebrated the exhilarating Boat Racing Festival in Luang Prabang on the Nam Khan river.

One of our intermediate students wrote the following about the history of the festival:
 
"When the water level of the Kham rives has reached its peak, the city of Luang Prabang celebrates the Boat Race Festival. The long boats which are launched on that occasion are sacred objects: the race itself is a religious ritual which seeks to mollify and cajole the Nagas, who live in glass palaces at the bottom of rivers. It is the Nagas, fabulous beings, half snake, and half man, belonging to the Brahman and Buddhist traditions, which control the annual rise and fall of the flood waters and are thus responsible for the fertility of the rice fields."

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