The fireworks are really the supporting act

When the first firework goes up, one realises one has been watching the wrong thing all along. The light splits open over the sea and falls again, but the truly beautiful part is not the sky — it is the water: the fireworks' reflection shatters into gold across Penghu's night sea, swaying with each wave. The wind is salty, carrying a little seaweed and diesel, cool on skin that has been in the sun all day, as if someone had gently turned down the heat.

The fireworks are set off at Guanyinting in Magong, where a steel arch bridge called the Xiying Rainbow Bridge stands by the bay, the fireworks bursting over the sea behind it. This summer-night event actually grew out of a low point — in the early 2000s an accident sent Penghu's tourism to the bottom, and so this fireworks festival was born to bring people back; held year after year, two decades on it has become the few nights when the whole island most feels like itself.

Everyone tilts their head back to photograph the sky, but the two of us kept looking down at the water. The Guanyinting sea wall was packed — some with beer, some with children — and an old man set his folding chair at the very edge, his back to the fireworks, watching that shattered gold too. The festival is held each summer, yet this Penghu sea sways just the same on nights without fireworks — only those nights have fewer people to keep it company.

Penghu by day is another thing entirely: basalt coasts baked scorching, low vegetable plots behind coral-stone walls, the sea an unreal blue. Only at dusk does the heat retreat, the sea wall slowly filling, stalls of cuttlefish balls and prickly-pear ice lighting up, the air afloat with fried-food savour and the sea's salt. We found a spot in the crowd and sat down too, shoulder against shoulder, neither speaking, just waiting — for the dark, for the first shot.

After the fireworks took their bow, we did not rush off, sitting on the sea wall a while longer. The fireworks gone, the sea returned to a deep blue-black, only a few fishing lights far out, blinking. The sound of the waves became the lead again, one after another, unhurried, just as it has been for centuries.

I think you too will find, as we did: what one truly remembers is not which shot was biggest or loudest, but those few minutes after the fireworks stopped, when the sea went quiet again — that is the sound Penghu was making all along, that you only finally stopped long enough to hear. And the person beside you who heard it with you will, years from now, thinking of this sea, likely think first of you.