孔明燈

Recently attended a conference in Thailand.

I shall not elaborate the detail of the conference, which may not be entirely interesting, here. As usual, all speakers were invited to a Thank You Dinner. On the schedule, it was nothing remarkable: we were led by local tourist guides to see some temples, followed by a short boat trip on the river, and finally a BBQ buffet.

But there was surprise after the food: We were invited to go back to the river side, and were met with a few young men, who gave us tens of (what appeared as) gigantic paper bags.

One of them put up a fire under a bag, which soon became swollen because of the hot air and flied up to the sky. Suddenly I realized what they were doing, “Oh, god. They’re setting up Kongming lanterns (孔明燈) !”

We were immediately encouraged to do one after seeing. Although the “game” is not new to me, it remained slightly challenging – to prevent the fire from actually burning the paper, which happened for my first try – and it was real fun to see the paper toy grew up in my own hands, seemed to loss its weight, and freed itself up into the thin air. In now time, we saw dozens of glowing stars on the winter sky of Chiang Mai.

PS. On a second thought, did Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮) make this gadget in order to confuse the astronomers of Sima Yi (司馬懿) ?