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China’s Torch Festival: Fire, Two Legends, Eight Days Off

Festivals
Aug 7, 2026
Torch Festival participants carrying blazing pine torches towards a tall wooden pyre in a crowded square

The Torch Festival, or huobajie, is the night southwest China sets itself on fire on purpose. It falls on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month, which in 2026 means August 6. Tens of thousands of people carry pine torches through the streets. Bonfires burn until dawn, and nobody goes to bed early. Yet outside China, almost nobody has heard of it — even though one Chinese prefecture takes eight consecutive days off for it.

When the Torch Festival Falls in 2026

The core date is the 24th day of the sixth lunar month. For 2026 that lands on Thursday, August 6. The Bai of Dali celebrate one day later, on the 25th. Most communities keep the fire going for three days, and the big prefectures now stretch the programme across weeks.

Liangshan started early this year. The “first torch” was lit on July 19 in Puge county, and the prefecture then rolled out 98 cultural and tourism events across all 17 of its counties and cities under a “6+N” programme (China Daily, 2026a). So the festival is less a single night than a season with one very loud peak.

One warning worth repeating. The date moves every year, because it is lunar. Never assume it repeats on the same August date next time — check before you book anything.

Eight Days Off: the Holiday Most of China Never Gets

Here is the detail that surprises people. In Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, the Torch Festival is a statutory local holiday, and a long one. The prefectural government’s 2026 arrangement (notice 凉府办函〔2025〕76号) gives August 5 for the Ethnic Unity and Progress Festival, then August 6 to 12 for the Torch Festival itself. Run them together and that is eight straight days. Two Sundays and Saturdays get worked back, on August 2 and August 15.

Eight days is longer than National Day. It is longer than anything except Spring Festival. And it applies to one prefecture in Sichuan, which is why the effect on the ground is so total — offices shut, families come home, and the whole place turns outward into the street.

The tourism numbers follow. Across the 2025 season, from July 11 to August 18, Liangshan’s 17 counties took 16.543 million visits, up 21.85% year on year, with visitor spending of 14.297 billion yuan, up 20.76% (Sichuan Observer, 2025). For a mountain prefecture, that is an enormous concentration of people.

Two Peoples, Two Legends, One Fire

What makes the Torch Festival unusual is that the same flame carries two opposite stories.

The Yi version is a victory. In the legend, a strongman named Atilaba beats a wrestler sent from the heavens. The defeated gods retaliate by sending swarms of locusts down onto the crops. So the people cut pine into torches and burn the pests out of the fields, and the harvest is saved. Fire wins.

The Bai version is a funeral. Around 1,300 years ago, so the story goes, the ambitious ruler Piluoge invited five rival chiefs to a banquet in a pine-wood tower at Dali, then burned it down with them inside. Lady Baijie had seen the plot coming and warned her husband. He went anyway. When she reached the ashes, the bodies could not be told apart. The torches commemorate her, not a triumph.

Both readings survive side by side, roughly 400 kilometres apart. Historians tend to place the older layer somewhere else entirely — in fire veneration itself. Yi communities lived high and cold, and depended on fire; records of the practice appear as far back as the Han (206 BC–AD 220) and Tang (618–907) dynasties (China Today, 2026). The festival was, plainly, about driving off pests and misfortune and asking for a harvest.

Inside the Torch Festival: Three Days, Three Movements

Traditionally the Torch Festival runs in three movements: welcoming the fire, playing with the fire, and sending the fire off (China Today, 2026). Each day has its own job.

  • Day one — welcoming. Households make offerings, honour ancestors, and light a new flame. A bimo, the Yi ritual specialist, leads the rites.
  • Day two — playing. This is the daytime spectacle: horse racing, wrestling, bullfighting, sheep fighting, cockfighting. Women in embroidered dress and yellow parasols dance the duoluohe in slow circles.
  • Day three — sending off. The torches go out together. People carry them through fields and lanes, then feed them into a communal bonfire and dance around it until very late.

The 2026 opening in Puge followed that shape closely. A bimo and two teenagers performed the torch-passing rite, and 600 Yi women danced in full ethnic dress before the evening carnival began (China Daily, 2026b). Scale gives you the rest of the picture: in Xichang, the carnival night has run 88 bonfires along 4.8 kilometres of Hangtian Avenue.

Foreign media coverage usually calls it the “Oriental Carnival” (CGTN, n.d.). The nickname is fair. It is loud, it is public, and strangers are pulled into the dancing without much ceremony.

The Torch Festival Is Not Only a Yi Festival

This is the most common misunderstanding in English writing on the subject. The Yi hold the largest celebrations, but the Bai, Naxi, Hani, Lahu and Pumi all keep the festival too, across Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou (CGTN, n.d.). China added the Torch Festival to its first national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006.

That spread gives you options. Liangshan and its capital Xichang are the biggest and most intense. Chuxiong, in Yunnan, is the other major Yi prefecture. In Dali the Bai light up on the 25th, with tall decorated torches raised in village squares. Around the Yunnan Stone Forest — Shilin, a Yi autonomous county — the celebration comes with wrestling and the Ashima legend attached.

The Torch Festival and Western Fire Nights

For a European or American reader, the closest reference points are midsummer fire nights: St John’s Eve bonfires, Sweden’s midsommar, Spain’s San Juan, or Britain’s Bonfire Night in November. The overlaps are real. All of them burn something at a hinge point in the agricultural year, and all of them turn a village inside out for a night.

But there are two clear differences. First, the fire here is carried, not just watched. You hold a torch, and children brush burning resin powder at each other in the street, which reads as alarming the first time and is treated as a blessing. Second, most Chinese festivals are indoor and family-shaped — Chinese festivals such as Spring Festival and Mid-Autumn revolve around a table. The Torch Festival does the opposite. It empties the houses.

One more contrast is worth naming. Bonfire Night burns an effigy of a man. The Torch Festival, in its Yi telling, burns insects. That says something about what each culture decided the real enemy was.

Practical Notes for Visiting the Torch Festival

  • Book far ahead. Eight days off plus 16 million seasonal visits does what you would expect to hotels and trains. Xichang fills first.
  • Getting there. Xichang sits on the Chengdu–Kunming line and has its own airport. Chengdu is the usual jumping-off point.
  • Altitude and sun. Xichang lies at roughly 1,500 metres. Days are strong and bright, evenings cool quickly. Bring sunscreen and a layer.
  • Clothes you can lose. Sparks land on everyone. Wear cotton, not synthetics, and leave anything precious at the hotel.
  • Ask before photographing. Ritual moments and elders in ceremonial dress deserve a question first. Most people say yes.
  • Check the schedule locally. Venues and dates shift between counties every year, and the staggered county events are announced late.

A small courtesy goes a long way here. The Torch Festival is a working religious and social occasion, not a performance staged for outsiders — even where the stage lights are enormous. Join the dancing, accept the buckwheat cakes and the bowl of liquor, and do not treat the bimo’s rites as a photo opportunity.

Is the Torch Festival Worth Planning a Trip Around?

If you want the version of China that no skyline photograph covers, then yes. The Torch Festival is one of the few occasions where a whole region stops work, and the reason it stops has nothing to do with the modern calendar at all. It is old, it is regional, and it is still genuinely popular rather than revived for tourism.

Practically, the smart move is to build the festival into a wider southwest route rather than fly in for one night. Liangshan for the fire, then Yunnan for the mountains and the Bai and Naxi towns. That way the lunar date decides two days of your trip, not all of it.

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