When Quanzhou people describe their city, they use a phrase: “Half city of smoke, half city of immortals.”

The first time I heard it, I thought it was just poetic exaggeration.

Then I read the Wanli Quanzhou Prefecture Chronicle and the Quanzhou Religious Chronicle. Turns out it’s not poetry at all. It’s journalism.

Starting in 1087, when Quanzhou established the Maritime Trade Office, ships from everywhere poured into this port city with goods and wealth. When the money rolled in, people started to have fun — lantern festivals, dragon boat races, weddings, worship ceremonies. Everything done on a grand scale.

Today, let me show you how the people of Quanzhou really knew how to live.

I. You Think Lantern Festival Is Just About Looking at Lights? Quanzhou Hung Tens of Thousands

Volume 3 of the Wanli Quanzhou Prefecture Chronicle has a line I haven’t been able to forget:

“The brilliance of its lanterns surpasses all of Fujian.”

In plain English: Quanzhou’s Lantern Festival display was the most epic in the entire province.

How epic? Tens of thousands of lanterns.

During the Wanli era (1573-1620), the main streets of Quanzhou city and its counties hung tens of thousands of lanterns around the 15th day of the first lunar month. Picture this: four hundred years ago, no LED, no electricity — all hand-made paper lanterns.

But the festival wasn’t just about looking at lights. The chronicle records something else: the local gentry organized a “Walk Away a Hundred Diseases” event — the whole city walking together to pray for health. In 1602, all 40 wards of the city participated, forming the prototype of Quanzhou’s unique “street parade” tradition.

Forty wards. The entire city. Walking together.

Dragon Boat Festival was just as wild. By the Southern Song (1174-1189), boat racing on the Jinjiang and Xunjiang rivers had reached massive proportions — 40 to 60 crew members per boat. By 1763, the “Lotus Picking” and boat races in Anhai had evolved beyond commemorating Qu Yuan. They became essential safety rituals for maritime traders.

Sixty people on a single boat, chanting in rhythm as they rowed. You couldn’t tell if it was a race, or a city expressing its reverence for the sea through sheer physical presence.

II. How Much Did a Wedding Cost? 100 Taels of Silver

The importance Quanzhou people placed on life’s big moments shows up clearly in their weddings.

During the Jiajing era (1522-1566), wedding rituals had become extremely lavish. According to the Wanli Chronicle, the “Three Letters and Six Rites” were standard practice, with dowries featuring exquisite canopy beds and large quantities of Dehua porcelain. Here’s the telling number: a middle-class wedding cost over 100 taels of silver.

What does 100 taels mean? A county magistrate’s annual salary was only a few dozen taels. One wedding cost several years of a magistrate’s pay.

By the early Qing (post-1684), with overseas trade reopening, Southeast Asian spices and exotic goods began appearing in betrothal gifts. The Quanzhou Place Names Gazetteer records a “Dowry Alley” — an entire street dedicated to the wedding business.

Quanzhou clans treated marriage contracts with extraordinary seriousness. Every marriage certificate was a vital supplement to the clan genealogy. You weren’t just marrying off a daughter or bringing in a daughter-in-law — you were signing a blood contract for the entire lineage.

Birthdays worked the same way. In Quanzhou, turning 50 is called “Grand Longevity.” In traditional Jinjiang and Nan’an villages, birthday gatherings for clan elders would draw hundreds of kinsmen. After the mid-19th century, fueled by overseas Chinese remittances, these birthday celebrations became opportunities to renovate ancestral halls and establish schools.

One birthday party became a school.

III. “Half Smoke” Means Pudu

When Quanzhou people say “half smoke,” they’re talking about folk religion.

What shocked me most in the Quanzhou Religious Chronicle wasn’t the number of temples — it was the organizational sophistication.

By 1602, every neighborhood (she) in Quanzhou had its own guardian deity. The most famous collective ritual is the “Pudu” of the seventh lunar month. But here’s the thing: Pudu in the old city didn’t happen on a single day. Different neighborhoods rotated through different days, the entire cycle lasting one month and covering over 100 corners of the city.

Over 100 corners. One month. Rotating worship. Think about the social organization required to coordinate that.

Mazu’s ceremonies were even more spectacular. After she received official recognition in 1123, every year on her birthday, over 100 vessels would gather at Tianhou Temple for a grand flag-hanging ceremony. A hundred ships raising flags simultaneously — the harbor looked like a forest of masts.

IV. Food Is Also Part of the Faith

Quanzhou people don’t just eat to stay full.

During the Southern Song, the custom of eating sweet dumplings (yuanzi) at the Winter Solstice was already established. By the Qing dynasty, over 20 workshops in the old city specialized in festival foods. The tradition of eating spring rolls (pobing) during Qingming Festival reportedly originated from the Cai Fuyi family in the Jiajing era and later spread across all counties.

One family’s eating habit became a city’s collective memory.

V. The Dialect Encodes the Folklore

Quanzhou dialect has 15 initials and 8 tones, a phonological system that had already stabilized by the Wanli era.

The Quanzhou Dialect Records document a fascinating phenomenon: during folk rituals like scripture chanting, the “literary reading” used preserves features of Sui and Tang dynasty rhyme books. In other words, if you attend a ritual in Quanzhou today, the pronunciation you hear is the same sounds Tang dynasty people heard.

Even more remarkable: researchers collected over 500 agricultural and folk proverbs from the Quanzhou Village Chronicles and mapped them geographically. The pattern was clear: coastal areas had a heavy concentration of proverbs about wind patterns — over 30 data points concentrated in Jinjiang and Hui’an. People in those areas couldn’t even speak proverbs without talking about the sea.

That’s what a maritime environment does to a culture’s thinking. You grow up by the sea, and your tongue, your proverbs, your gods — they all taste like salt.

Closing

From the Wanli Chronicle’s praise of “refined customs” to the modern city gazetteer’s systematic survey of intangible cultural heritage, Quanzhou’s folk traditions have never been frozen specimens.

They’re alive.

Tens of thousands of lanterns. Hundred-tael dowries. Over a hundred ritual vessels. These aren’t cold historical data points. They’re the life codes that have allowed Quanzhou people to maintain their cultural identity across a thousand years.

You asked what “half city of smoke, half city of immortals” means?

Half smoke — that’s Quanzhou people living their lives with full seriousness.

Half immortals — that’s them worshipping their gods with the same intensity.

Between smoke and immortals, they never had to choose. That’s Quanzhou.