This past weekend a friend and I went to the annual Jinju Lantern Festival. Jinju is a city about two hours east of Gwangju with a population of a little over 300,000. The lantern festival is one of its biggest tourist attractions and features hundreds of various lanterns. Typically, this festival is held in October, but because of COVID it was postponed until December.
As usual, catching the bus was dramatic. We arrived at Gwangju’s bus terminal around 1p.m. and when we looked at the ticket machine we saw that the next bus was leaving at 1:05 while the next one after that was at 2:30. This led to a mad rush to buy the tickets for the 1:05 bus followed by a sprint through the bus terminal to get to our platform. Luckily, we made it in time and all was well.
After a nice two nap on the bus, we arrived in Jinju. Our first order of business was getting bus tickets for the ride back later that evening. To our dismay the last bus left at 7 p.m. which only gave us about four hours to enjoy the festival and not a lot of that time would be in the dark. However, seeing as we did not have a lot of time, we headed straight to the festival.
The festival was held at Jinjuseong Fortress, a stone fortress that was built in 1379. The fortress overlooked the Nam River, which runs through the middle of the city. While walking across the bridge to get to the fortress’ entrance, we saw countless floating lanterns that were shaped in fun figures such as bulls, peacocks, and various animals or characters. All of those would light up when it became dark enough. Entrance to the fortress was only 2,000 KRW ($1.68) which was very nice.
When we entered, we were greeted by hundreds of lanterns shaped in all sorts of ways. We saw the traditional lanterns that were hanging from the trees, a lantern tunnel with some heart shaped lanterns decorated by kids, and then there were the figurines. These were people, animals, and shapes that formed a scene of some sort that would then light up when it was dark.
Even though it was still daytime, we had a great time walking around and looking at all the lanterns. Some of my favorites included a cricket orchestra, two dogs sunbathing, and a fairy village. I also loved all the hanging lanterns; they made the whole fort seem very magical. We also saw Santa Claus! It finally felt like Christmas:)
After walking around for an hour or so, we stopped at a cafe to warm up and get some drinks and snacks. Conveniently, there were a few cafes within the fort so we hung out there for a while and warmed up before heading back outside.
At this point it was nearing sunset so we headed up to a pavilion that had an overview of the city to watch the sunset. It was a beautiful sunset and as we watched we began to get excited for all the lights we would see. We started wondering what time the lights would turn on and when we looked it up we saw an announcement saying the festival had been cancelled due to the new Covid rules put into place the day before. After reading that, we had a moment of “Oh no did we just waste hours of our life coming to a festival that wasn’t even happening?!?!” Following our initial freakout we realized we would just have to wait until it got dark to see what would happen.
Luckily, the lights did turn on! At least some of them did. All of the hanging lanterns lit up and a few of the figures, but the floating lanterns never did nor did the lantern tunnel which we were looking forward to. I’m not sure why some of them were on while others weren’t, but we were beyond excited that at least some of the lights were on! We probably walked through the fortress three times to look at all of them before we had to go back to the bus.
Even though the festival wasn’t what we were expecting, we still had a lot of fun exploring a new city and seeing the craftsmanship of the lanterns. It was a good experience and I highly recommend any tourists to check out the Jinju Lantern Festival. Without Covid, I can only imagine how cool it would be.
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