A Lantern Has No Practical Job

灯笼本来就不实用

That may be exactly why people still carry one.

也许正因如此，人们才还愿意提着它。

Mid-Autumn Festival arrives tomorrow, and with it comes an object that would not survive a serious engineering review. A lantern gives little light. It dislikes rain. The paper version tears, the candle version needs watching, and even the modern battery version is usually less useful than the torch already inside a phone. Yet when evening comes, people still want lanterns.

Most things around us are now expected to do more. A phone is also a camera, map, wallet, clock and ticket. A watch counts steps. A television answers questions. Even a refrigerator is occasionally asked to become clever. The lantern is almost embarrassingly single-purpose. It makes a small pool of light, and sometimes not even a very reliable one.

But a lantern changes the way a person moves. You cannot swing it about carelessly. You notice wind. You slow down at steps. Children look at one another’s colours. Adults who would normally walk while staring at a screen have at least one hand occupied by something that cannot send a notification. That is not much of an achievement, but it is not nothing either.

Old towns understand this sort of limited usefulness quite well. A five-foot way is useful, but nobody designed it to maximise data. An old window may be less airtight than a new one, yet it still tells you something about the hand that made it and the climate it was meant for. A kopitiam cup does not need an app. Taiping contains plenty of things that continue to earn their place without becoming more efficient every year.

A festival is also allowed to be temporary. The lantern comes out, glows for a while, then goes back into a cupboard or becomes paper again. That briefness is part of the point. If every decoration had to justify itself for twelve months, every celebration would slowly turn into permanent interior design. A festival needs an ending, otherwise the next one has nowhere to begin.

So a lantern remains poor technology and a perfectly good festival object. Tomorrow night, when a few small lights appear against the dark, nobody needs to measure their efficiency. They only need to be there for a while. Some things do not improve by becoming more practical.

Published 24 September 2026

Staying in Taiping? See Sojourn’s rooms · Direct enquiry

A direct enquiry is non-binding. It does not reserve, hold or guarantee a room until Sojourn confirms availability.

Source

Mid-Autumn Festival in Malaysia falls on 25 September 2026. Date checked against Kalender Malaysia. Featured image is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Kalender Malaysia — Mid-Autumn Festival · Wikimedia Commons — image and licence

← Previous← Sebelumnya← 上一篇← 上一篇Next →Seterusnya →下一篇 →下一篇 →