The biggest Mid-Autumn Festival lantern procession in Vietnam

On the evening of September 17, thousands of children, students, and many locals and tourists gathered at Nguyen Tat Thanh Square, Phan Thiet City (Binh Thuan) to attend the 2013 Mid-Autumn Festival.

Mid-Autumn Festival in Phan Thiet city.
(Photo: Nguyen Thanh/VNA)

This festival has been recognized by Vietbooks magazine as a Vietnamese record, as “The largest Mid-Autumn Festival in Vietnam” and received The Guide Awards for “The most unique and successful cultural festival serving the Vietnamese tourism industry.”

With the theme “Phan Thiet Children - Happy Mid-Autumn Festival - Wings for the Future - Nurturing Dreams”, this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival attracted nearly 3,000 students from 30 primary and secondary schools and school clusters in Phan Thiet City. Each school had one large lantern and 100 small lanterns.
According to the Organizing Committee, this year the large lanterns are designed more elaborately, vividly and richly than in previous years. Besides the lanterns with ideas revolving around fairy tales such as Cuoi-Banyan tree, Goldfish, and Tam, there are also lanterns created in the shape of Phan Thiet Water Tower, Truong Sa milestone, etc.

The unique feature of the 2013 Mid-Autumn Festival is that thousands of small lanterns are made by students themselves according to the model, size, theme and instructions of the school. The light only uses wax lamps, not flashlights or electronic lights.

Amidst the bustling sound of lion dance drums, 30 large lanterns and thousands of small lanterns paraded through the central streets of Phan Thiet. The crowd made the streets of Phan Thiet bustling and colorful.

Thousands of Phan Thiet residents and numerous domestic and foreign tourists joined the crowd to celebrate a meaningful and unique full moon festival with the children.

The Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival has created a healthy and useful playground for Phan Thiet children during the Mid-Autumn Festival; encouraging students to study hard and practice morality at the beginning of the new school year...

Binh Thuan province has identified this as one of the five traditional festivals of the locality to serve tourism development and promote the Binh Thuan brand to domestic and foreign tourists./.

According to VNA - M.D