Shawanzhen

This guide to Shawanzhen in Guangzhou follows the piaose, or floating color parade, staged every year on the third day of the third lunar month, when children dressed as gods and opera heroines seem to hover above the crowd on wooden platforms. It traces the parade back to worship of Beidi, the Daoist god of water, first recorded in the late Ming dynasty as the town's answer to constant flood danger along the Pearl River delta. A solemn procession of statues gradually gave way to living children in costume, carried through lanes lined with the town's hundred-odd ancestral halls. Come on parade day to see the platforms carried shoulder-high through those same streets.