The lanterns are pushed into the port, and the whole wharf turns to light

By the time the wharf is reached, the floats are already drawing slowly near. Each carries a water lantern bound from lanterns, red, gold, orange, the colours full, bright enough in the harbour night to be seen from far off. The ceremony begins, the officiant intoning line by line, the crowd falling quiet, then together pushing the lanterns into the sea — hundreds drifting out at once, the surface of Keelung Harbour staining from deep black, inch by inch, into swaying gold. The lanterns drift farther and farther, far enough to sink into the dark of the port; only when nothing at all can be seen does one turn away. This is the night of the water lanterns at the Keelung Ghost Festival, the fourteenth of the seventh lunar month, the most important night of the whole Ghost Month.

The festival's origin is more concrete than Ghost Month itself. In the Xianfeng era of the Qing, Keelung's Zhangzhou and Quanzhou settlers feuded without end, and many died; the elders of both sides later came forward to make peace, buried the bones of the dead together as the "Elder Lords," and set down an agreement: no longer to settle rank with fists, but to have the surname clans take turns hosting the Ghost Festival, replacing broken heads with a contest of performance troupes. That rotation has carried on from 1855 to today, a different host family each year, each with its own crest and customs — the grand festival before you is, at its root, a peace that stopped a bleeding.

Why release water lanterns? Legend holds that in the seventh month the lonely spirits in the water cannot find their way, so people on shore light lanterns to guide them ashore, to come and receive the offerings of the universal salvation. So these hundreds of lanterns are not for show; they point a way for the spirits no one remembers any more. The farther they drift, it is said, the more fortune flows to that surname — yet standing on the shore, what is in the mind is not fortune, but whose way home those lanterns are lighting.

In the days before, the surname clans raise altars across Keelung, some six or seven tiers high, every offering and paper effigy in its meaningful place. Walking the city by day one passes them one after another, each a different style, fine as installation art, though few stop to look. At one altar a middle-aged man quietly set down an offering, stood a moment, did not bow long, and left — that quiet not quite like worshipping a god, more like speaking, low, to someone.

After the ceremony, into a temple-front stall, a bowl of pork-rib rice ordered. The rice soft, the soup hot, eaten slowly. Out by the harbour a few lanterns that had not drifted far still blinked in the dark, like an ending note someone left behind, reluctant to gather up. No words, just sitting and watching, until the lanterns too were gone, then rising for the station.

On the sea wind there is incense, cooking smoke, and a touch of the sea's salt, mixed together, the smell particular to this port town in the seventh month. The night was heavier than expected. I think you too will be like me, carrying it back to Taipei — carrying back not the spectacle, but that quiet, unspoken tenderness of lighting a lantern for a stranger's lonely soul.