IN HIGH SPIRITS

The southern Thai island of Phuket has an intriguing and distinctive identity - with an annual vegetarian festival that confounds all expectations, pastel-hued old town and Peranakan culture rooted in China

- DANIEL STABLES

It’s 5.30am, and the sunrise is starting to spear shards of light through a bruised sky. Wreaths of incense smoke carry the heady scent of camphor and sandalwood on the breeze. It’s the end of monsoon season and storms are forecast, but my guide, Jo Lecourt, assures me that it never rains during the Phuket Vegetarian Festival.

You might imagine a vegetarian festival to be a largely placid affair. But you would be sorely mistaken.

Jo points out a woman a couple of metres in front of us. She’s wearing a tiara and a splendid electric-blue tunic, brocaded with floral patterns and Chinese characters. She begins to gag, her body starts to shake and her eyes glaze over; she’s helped into a chair by a team of assistants, who proceed to impale both her cheeks with foot-long skewers. No anaesthetic is used, but she doesn’t flinch. Soon she rises from her chair and joins a long queue of similarly pierced devotees — around 1,900 of them today — on a procession around Phuket Old Town.

These parades are the centrepiece of the festival, a nine-day spectacle of ritual mutilation, pyrotechnics and meat-free food which descends on Phuket in the ninth lunar month of each year. It has a history dating back some 200 years. The story goes that an opera troupe made up of Hokkien-speaking Taoists from China’s Fujian province was touring Phuket in 1825 when they got caught up in a cholera epidemic. They attributed the plague to the fact that they’d been neglecting their worship of the gods, and so swiftly resumed their practices from back home, including ritual mutilation and adherence to a meat-free diet. The epidemic soon ended and the opera troupe left Phuket not long after, but they inspired the annual festival.