Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival: The City's Biggest Week
Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival: The City's Biggest Week Ubon Ratchathani is best known for a single week each year, when the whole city turns to wax. The Ubon Candle Festival, held around the Buddhist Lent holiday of Asalha Puja, is Thailand's most famous candle procession: enormous carved candles, some as long as a lorry and as tall as a house, paraded through the city in a festival of music, dance, food and merit-making. If you can time one trip to Ubon, time it for this. Why Candles? The festival comes from Buddhist Lent, the three-month rainy-season retreat when monks stay in their temples and laypeople offer candles so the temples have light. Ubon turned that offering into art. The city's temples began competing on craftsmanship, and the candles grew from practical offerings into towering carved scenes from Buddhist legend and Thai life, paraded to the temples. The modern festival, centred on Thung Si Muang park and the streets around it, is the result: part relig...