2025 Huwei Chungyuan Festival

The 2025 Huwei Chungyuan Festival is centered on the theme of “Heritage and Innovation.” Structured around eight major Pudu districts, the festival continues century-old rituals and ceremonial practices while integrating digital technologies, participatory interactions, and curated exhibitions and performances.By reinterpreting traditional Pudu rituals through contemporary cultural design, the festival successfully transforms a deeply rooted religious practice into a cross-generational cultural celebration. It stands as one of Southern Taiwan’s most representative and influential Chungyuan Festival events, demonstrating how intangible heritage can evolve into an inclusive, forward-looking public cultural experience.
The Chungyuan Festival is a long-established traditional celebration in Taiwan. Through the ritual of Pudu—the ceremonial arrangement of offerings—communities pray for peace, express gratitude to ancestors, and sustain the continuity of cultural memory. The 2025 Huwei Chungyuan Festival adopts the curatorial concept of “One District, One Distinctive Expression,” transforming ritual practices into a series of site-specific ceremonial landscapes. Local peanuts, a key agricultural specialty, are combined with the zodiac symbol of the Year of the Snake to create a thematic Pudu table that integrates agricultural identity with symbolic cultural storytelling. Responding to Huwei’s historical role in Taiwan’s sugar industry, the festival also introduces the “Sugar Offering Pudu,” where sugar itself becomes both an offering and a narrative medium.
Other ritual installations include the “Abundance Meat Mountain,” symbolizing prosperity and communal generosity; the “Children’s Pudu,” dedicated to blessings and protection for younger generations; and offering tables representing Catholicism, Christianity, and other belief systems—collectively illustrating the coexistence of diverse religions within the local cultural landscape.
The festival further integrates ice sculpture art, exhibitions of historical artifacts, and interpretive displays of traditional rituals. A rich program of folk performances, participatory blessing activities, and ceremonial parades—such as Moon-Block Divination for Peace Rice, the Golden Youth Procession, and the Firework Fortress Ceremony—unfolds throughout the event. Together, these elements construct a layered and immersive cultural experience that bridges ritual heritage, spatial design, history, and contemporary public engagement.