Southern Taiwan's Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival went off with a bang this year. The event in the outskirts of Tainan City has been running for over a hundred years, with participants in protective clothing facing an onslaught of bottle rockets fired into the crowd. The tradition began to honor the guardian deity Guan Yu or Guan Gong and to ask for protection from an epidemic raging through the area at the time.