One month-long birthday celebration has brought more than one thousand performance troupes to the streets in Chiayi, Taiwan.

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Every year in Chiayi's Lucao Township, devotees celebrate the birthday of Yuciye Gong with a unique month-long religious festival featuring more than 1,000 glove puppet and Taiwanese opera performances staged along the streets.

Move over, Coachella. There’s a new music festival in town, and the party lasts all month long. 

At Yuciye Gong Temple in Chiayi County’s Lucao Township, a veritable sea of colorful puppet-theater stages decorated with auspicious dragons and lions can be seen along the roadside. Accompanied by the sound of gongs and drums, performers begin the traditional ritual of honoring and celebrating the deity's birthday. 

The celebration, which takes place during the fourth and fifth lunar months, is unique to this location, and this year it includes more than a thousand glove puppet and Taiwanese opera troupes performing one after another. Even heavy rain has not deterred the festivities.

The long-established birthday celebration, set against a backdrop of hundreds of performance stages, has turned the practice of offering performances to thank the gods into one of the region’s most distinctive cultural traditions.