Phuket Vegetarian Festival 2026: Dates, Rituals, Shrines

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival runs from Saturday 10 October to Sunday 18 October 2026, nine days, and it is free to watch. The Tourism Authority of Thailand lists those dates on its own 2026 events calendar. It is a Taoist festival honouring the Nine Emperor Gods, and the cheek piercing that gets it called the Thailand piercing festival is one part of a nine-day religious observance rather than the whole of it.

Devotees dress in white, give up meat, alcohol and sex for the duration, and eat from stalls flying yellow flags. Spirit mediums called ma song go into trance at the shrines before dawn, are pierced through the cheeks with swords, skewers and stranger objects, and walk barefoot through Phuket Town while firecrackers go off at their feet. Both of those things are the same festival. This page covers when it happens, why, what you will see and how to watch it without getting hurt.

When is the Phuket Vegetarian Festival?

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is on 10 to 18 October in 2026, and the dates move every year because they follow the Chinese lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian one. The festival always covers the first nine days of the ninth lunar month, which lands in late September or October.

The bamboo Go Teng pole that opens the festival goes up at every shrine on the evening before, Friday 9 October 2026, and comes down the day after it ends. That is why some listings give the dates as 9 to 19 October. The nine days of ritual are the 10th to the 18th, and the night of the 18th is the finale.

The 2027 dates had not been published when this page was written. The lunar rule means they will fall somewhere in late September or October 2027, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand posts the confirmed dates on its events calendar once the shrines agree them. Do not book flights against a guessed date.

Phuket’s is the largest version of the festival, but it is not the only one. Bangkok’s Chinatown, Trang, Hat Yai and Chinese communities across Southeast Asia keep the same nine days, and in Malaysia and Singapore it is known by its Hokkien name, Kew Ong Yeah.

What the Phuket Vegetarian Festival actually is

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival is the Thai version of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, a nine-day Taoist observance that starts on the eve of the ninth lunar month. Thai calls it thetsakan kin che, the vegetarian festival, and southern Thailand calls it kin phak, eating vegetables.

The Nine Emperor Gods are the nine sons of Dou Mu, the Mother of the Big Dipper, who in Taoist belief keeps the register of life and death. Seven of the nine correspond to the visible stars of the Big Dipper and two to stars that cannot be seen. The gods are believed to arrive along the waterways at the start of the nine days and to be sent back the same way at the end, which is why the final night ends at the shore.

The name is about food because the fast is the part everyone can join. Devotees eat no meat, no eggs, no dairy and nothing with a strong smell such as garlic, which makes the festival diet vegan rather than vegetarian. Stalls and restaurants serving festival food fly a yellow flag with the red Thai character เจ, jae, on it, and for these nine days Phuket Town is one of the easiest places in Thailand to eat vegan without asking a question.

Much of Phuket’s population is Peranakan, descended from the Hokkien Chinese who came for the tin mines and married into local families, which is why the island keeps the festival more intensively than anywhere else in Thailand. The festival also falls at the same time as the Hindu Navaratri, so you will see Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu images side by side inside the shrines.

Why the festival started

The festival started in 1825, when a travelling Chinese opera troupe fell ill in Phuket and recovered after returning to the rites they had let slip. The troupe were Hokkien-speaking Taoists from Fujian province, in Phuket to perform for the tin miners, and they were caught in an epidemic that different accounts describe as cholera and as malaria.

They concluded that they had been neglecting the Nine Emperor Gods, resumed the fast and the rituals they had grown up with, and the sickness passed. The troupe moved on, the local community kept the observance, and Phuket has held it every year since. Phuket marked the festival’s 200th anniversary in 2025, which puts the arithmetic beyond argument.

The ma song and the cheek piercing

The ma song are the spirit mediums the festival is built around, and the piercing is something done to them rather than by them. Ma song translates as entranced horse: the medium is the horse that a god rides for the duration.

A ma song enters a trance inside the shrine, shaking and glassy-eyed, and is then helped into a chair by a team of attendants who push the piercing through both cheeks. No anaesthetic is used. Mediums say afterwards that they felt nothing and remember nothing of the procession. The objects range from foot-long skewers to swords, spears, umbrellas, ball-and-chain assemblies and, in the stranger years, petrol pump nozzles and car parts. Some mediums also cut their tongues or foreheads with blades.

The purpose is transfer. The medium takes on the misfortune of the community and carries it out of the town, so the piercing is a burden accepted rather than a stunt performed. National Geographic Traveller counted about 1,900 pierced devotees on a single day’s procession in its 2024 report on the festival.

Two other rituals run in the evenings at the larger shrines: fire-walking across a bed of hot charcoal, and climbing a ladder whose rungs are blades. Each shrine sets its own nights for these and announces them close to the date.

What a morning at the piercing ceremony is like

A morning at the piercing ceremony starts before dawn at whichever shrine has the day, and the piercing itself happens inside the shrine grounds before the procession sets off. The account below is from Megan, who was teaching English in Thailand and went on the fourth morning of the festival with three other teachers.

I climbed the temple stairs past a bare-chested man with a ball and chain slung through his left cheek, holding each end of the chain in his hands, blood running down his chin. At the top of the stairs, in the pre-dawn mist, was an old Chinese shrine, and it was full of people preparing themselves and each other to be pierced.

We had woken before the sun and taken a tuk-tuk out of town to the shrine that had the day. Inside, the ma song prayed and called on the Nine Emperor Gods, and then, calm and entranced, they had their faces pierced with a sword, a spear, skewers, a gun, a ten-foot umbrella, poles, a ball and chain. Attendees crowded round in a circle to watch. The mediums sat down, took the piercing without flinching, walked away and made room for the next one. It was as orderly as a queue at a dentist.

By sunrise something like a hundred ma song had been pierced. A bell started ringing inside the shrine, fireworks went off all round the building, and a man came out swinging an axe, spun in circles, struck himself once in the forehead and stood still while the blood ran down. Then the mediums climbed into the backs of pickup trucks and were driven to the point where the walk starts.

We got left behind chasing the trucks on foot, until a man with four children in the back of his own truck took pity on us and pulled over. He spoke almost no English and we spoke almost no Thai, and he spent the rest of the morning shouting “farang, farang” to his neighbours, fetching us ice cream from a cart wheeling down the road between the mediums, and handing us good-luck bracelets from the shrine.

The parade itself was firecrackers thrown at the mediums’ feet, smoke, and us being photographed by locals while a man beside me walked past with a gun through his cheek. It ended near noon with a last round of firecrackers, set off to drive away anything left behind. A man covered in the debris asked me to take his photograph, struck a pose, leaned in and said, “The world is good. Just dream, you know?” Then he went back to the fireworks.

The nine days, shrine by shrine

Each day of the festival belongs to a different shrine, which sends its own procession through Phuket Town in the early morning. The order of the shrines repeats every year, so it is the festival day number that fixes which shrine you are watching. The rotation for 2026 is listed below.

Sui Boon Tong and Lor Rong are the same shrine under two names, which trips up a lot of listings. Each shrine sets its own start times and posts the confirmed programme at the shrine gate and with TAT Phuket in late September, so check locally rather than working from last year’s times.

Processions leave the shrines between about 6am and 8am, and the piercing happens in the shrine grounds from around 5.30am. Arrive when the procession leaves and you will have missed how it starts.

If you have one morning, take day 7 or day 8: Jui Tui on 16 October and Kathu on 17 October carry the largest processions and the most mediums. If you have one night, take the 18th, when the processions converge on Saphan Hin on the eastern edge of town and the gods are sent back to heaven. The main rites there run past midnight and the firecracker volume is on a different scale from the rest of the week.

The ten rules of the festival

The ten rules of the Phuket Vegetarian Festival apply to people keeping the fast, not to spectators, but they explain most of what you will see on the street. Tourism Authority of Thailand publishes them as follows.

1. Wear white clothes for the whole festival.
2. Eat no meat and no animal products, including milk and eggs.
3. Keep your body clean.
4. Drink no alcohol.
5. Do not lie, cheat or steal.
6. Have no sexual activity during the festival.
7. Eat no food with a strong smell, such as garlic.
8. Keep and wash your cooking utensils separately from those used outside the fast.
9. Do not attend if you are in mourning.
10. Do not take part if you are menstruating or pregnant.

Visitors are welcome at the shrines and the processions without keeping any of this. Wearing white is a courtesy rather than a requirement, and it does make you less conspicuous in a crowd where almost everyone else is dressed in it.

What to wear and what to bring

Wear closed shoes, long sleeves and earplugs, because the hazard at this festival is firecrackers rather than anything the mediums are doing. Firecrackers are thrown at the mediums’ feet from the pavement all along the route, and Phuket City Police issue a warning every year about throwing them into crowds. The emergency number in Thailand is 191.

The other things worth carrying are listed below.

• Eye protection, because the smoke is constant and the debris is not always small.
• A hat and water, since the processions run from before dawn into the heat of the day.
• Cash in small notes, because the food stalls do not take cards.
• A camera you do not mind covering in firecracker paper, and the sense not to point it into a medium’s face mid-trance.

Nothing needs to be booked and there are no tickets. The processions, the fire-walking, the blade-ladder climbing and the final night at Saphan Hin are all free, and the shrines stay open to visitors throughout. The only thing you pay for is food, at street stall prices.

On the food: the stalls along Ranong Road by Jui Tui Shrine run all week and are the easiest introduction if you want the atmosphere without the blood. Expect noodles, deep-fried things and tofu shaped like meat rather than a table of vegetables. Phuket is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, one of two in Thailand, and the festival is the week its Peranakan cooking is most visible.

Selected activities in Phuket

The activities worth booking around the festival are the ones that get you out of Phuket Town on the days between processions. Two are listed below.

• Visit an elephant sanctuary.
• Take a small group tour of Phuket’s highlights.

Other things to do in Phuket, Thailand

Phuket outside the festival is beaches, the Old Town’s Sino-Portuguese shophouses and the islands in Phang Nga Bay, and the town itself is the part most visitors skip. This list of things to do in Phuket covers what there is beyond Patong Beach.

Phuket is also a long way from the rest of the country, so most people fly in. If you are coming overland or moving on to the islands afterwards, ferries, buses and trains across Thailand can be booked in advance through 12Go, which covers the Phuket to Krabi and Phuket to Koh Samui routes as well as the mainland.

For the wider trip, the Thailand travel guide covers the regions and the seasons, and the fun facts about Thailand page explains a few of the things that catch first-time visitors out, including the temple dress code and why you never step on Thai money.

Where to stay in Phuket, Thailand

Stay in Phuket Town rather than at the beach if you are coming for the festival, because every procession starts and finishes within walking distance of the Old Town and the roads close early. Patong is about 15 km (9.3 mi) away over a hill, which is a slow drive on festival mornings.

Hotels and guesthouses across every budget are listed on Booking.com’s Phuket page, which covers the Old Town, Patong and the quieter southern beaches. Rooms in Phuket Town sell out for the festival week, so book well ahead.

If an apartment suits you better than a hotel room, Vrbo has Phuket apartments, which works out cheaper than a hotel for a stay of more than a few nights.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 5 tips below come from Megan’s morning at the shrine and the parade that followed, and from the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s own festival information, and they are the ones that decide how the day goes.

1. Dress for firecrackers, not for a temple. The hazard here is not the piercings, it is the fireworks thrown at the mediums’ feet from the pavement all along the route. Closed shoes, long sleeves and earplugs, and a camera you do not mind covering in burnt paper. Thailand’s emergency number is 191.
2. Set an alarm for the dark if you want the piercing ceremony. The trances and the piercings happen at the shrine before dawn, and the procession only leaves afterwards. Getting there for the parade means arriving after the part almost nobody writes about.
3. Check the shrine’s own programme in late September. Each of the nine shrines sets its own start times and posts the confirmed programme at its gate and with TAT Phuket shortly before the festival, so last year’s timings are of no use. Note that Sui Boon Tong and Lor Rong are the same shrine under two names.
4. Pick your day by what you want to see. Jui Tui and Kathu carry the largest processions and the most mediums, and the last night ends at Saphan Hin, where the send-off runs past midnight and the firecracker volume is on another scale entirely.
5. Eat on Ranong Road if the blood is not for you. The stalls by Jui Tui Shrine run all week, they fly the yellow jae flag, and they are the whole festival minus the piercing: noodles, fried things and tofu shaped like meat, in a city UNESCO lists for its cooking.

About the author. This guide is maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand account of the piercing ceremony in this post comes from Megan, who was teaching English in Thailand and wrote about her travels at Nomadic Megan. The team covers Thailand for independent travellers, including the festivals, tours and places to stay worth booking, and rechecks the dates on this page against the Tourism Authority of Thailand’s calendar each year, because they move with the lunar month.