Thailand Festival Festivals 

bear a Chinese character in red, with the Thai word “jeh” next to it. Both mean vegetarian. Any vendor displaying these flags will be selling flesh free food and the restaurants will have adapted their usual recipes to meatless cooking.

In Bangkok, the Vegetarian Festival is best seen in Yaowarat – the city’s picturesque Chinatown. It begins there on the first day of the 9th month of the Chinese lunar calendar with ceremonies similar to those on Phuket. Even before that, Chinatown residents will have started stocking up on vegetarian meat substitutes – usually high protein soy bean products, and it has been estimated that meat sales drop by as much as 70 percent during the ten days of the festival.

But the festival is not limited to the Chinese-Thai community. Many ethnic Thais and even foreign expats welcome the change to a vegetarian diet, and perhaps one restaurant in five will switch over. In fact, vegetarian tourists have been known to plan their visits to the kingdom to coincide with this period.

The dishes offered during the Vegetarian Festival are delightful. All of the Thai favorites are available, but with a slightly different twist. Instead of tom yam gung (spicy shrimp soup), there will be tom yam jeh (spicy vegetable soup). Gaeng matsaman, a delicious southern Thai curry made with chicken, potatoes, onions and peanuts, instead will have the chicken replaced by tofu. Gaeng kiao wan, a mild green curry usually made with chicken or fish, will now be made with soy protein. Mushrooms of all types will be used in abundance, and the big yellow Japanese soba noodles are used to produce a version of kweitiou pat Thai (noodles fried Thai style) that is well worth waiting for.

In fact, Thailand’s Vegetarian Festival is probably one of the best times to visit the country, even though it does fall within the end of the rainy season, that means you have a good chance that there are no drops coming down and the next day you can sunbath at the beach. And the choices of food offered at this time of year rival the best of any cuisine that Asia has to offer.

If you visit Thailand at that time of year, just tell the waiter you want to try the aharn jeh, the dishes on the vegetarian menu. Most restaurants will have one. It makes a pleasant break from the usual meat heavy diet that is so common in the west.

Aharn jeh aroy mahk! Thai vegetarian food is delicious. Try it and see if you don’t agree. You should also visit us on http://www.foodinthai.com where you will be introduced to the origins and types of Thai food, Thai cooking, courses and the various Cooking Schools in Thailand. We hope you will stay with us and enjoy learning more about it.

About The Author
John Turner lives in Bangkok and recently started work on http://www.foodinthai.com which is a journal where he hopes to capture some of the rare and very special moments he has experienced during the time he has spent in the Kingdom of Thailand

- A taste of Thailand - Vegetarian Festival   - Vegetarian Festival Video

The Menam Chao Phraya is a wide, muddy river that flows through the heart of Thailand. Its tributaries drain most of the country, including the rice fields of the central plain which have fed the Kingdom for centuries. Although modern Bangkok sprawls along roads in all directions, the river is the center of the city. Along its banks are Bangkok's oldest temples, its largest produce market, the Grand Palace and the famous Oriental Hotel

Here, too, are the Chinese-Thai neighborhoods that are an intriguing mix of residences, small manufacturing operations, offices and shops.

All day long, high-speed "long-tailed" boats roar up and down the river carrying sightseers, while at night, floating restaurants carry diners in a long slow loop up and down the river. River transportation is also a popular alternative to Bangkok's grid-locked roads. From 6 in the morning until 7 at night, public river boats travel the Chao Phraya. For less than 50 cents, you can journey for miles past wooden houseboats, temples, riverside restaurants and newer luxury hotels.

If you visit in the fall, you might notice crowds of people, bright lights and colorful banners surrounding a small riverside temple, Wat Josue Kong (wat means temple in Thai).

This is Bangkok's vegetarian festival, the Festival of the Nine Imperial Gods, which takes place during the first nine days of the ninth Chinese lunar month. (This year, it began Sept. 23 and ended Oct. 1; next year it will begin on Oct. 11 and end on Oct. 20. Getting off at the next boat stop to investigate low the congested streets parallel to the river.

You walk past storefront machine shops where metal-smiths pound hot steel into boat anchors and crowbars, past crews of young men braiding half-inch thick steel cables and down narrow streets lined with piles of truck axles and engine parts. Then you turn a comer and follow a growing stream of people moving toward a small, crowded street aglow with fluorescent lights.

Now you're in the Thalad Noi area of Bangkok's Chinatown (near the end of Charoen Krung Road's Soi 20). It's about a 20-minute walk up river from the Sheraton Hotel's River City complex, although the Harbor Department express boat stop is the closest one to the festival.

Here, the grimy storefront machine shops are obscured by rows of vendors selling lotus flowers, fruits, candles, incense and brightly colored religious objects. Scores of other vendors are selling fried, boiled, steamed and roasted vegetarian foods. Walk through the gauntlet of vendors and you find yourself in a large covered square, half of which is filled with folding tables, chairs and impromptu kitchens. The other half contains a large, raised altar bearing three-foot tall candles and huge, smoldering logs of incense.

At one end of the square is a Chinese-Thai Buddhist temple hung with banners and lit with neon lights. At the other end is a Chinese opera stage where characters in dramatic makeup and sequined costumes act out scenes to the sound of gongs and stringed instruments. In front of you, a woman and her daughter kneel at the altar and male attendants carry a log of incense over their shoulders.

The vegetarian festival is a centuries-old Taoist celebration that began in southern China. Legend has it that the festival originated at a time of flood, fire and famine from which people were saved by Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. To thank her, the people invited nine gods to join them for a festival of purification in which their sins and those of their ancestors would be washed away. As part of the purification, celebrants adhere to a vegetarian practice, known in Thai as kin jeh, for the 10-day festival.

Eating meat and eggs is prohibited, as well as garlic, green and yellow onions and shallots. These aromatic foods are believed to excite or heat up the body, a condition not conducive to worship and meditation. (A similar prohibition against onion and garlic exists in orthodox Hindu cooking.)

Today, most of the people who participate in the festival are Chinese-Thai. The  

entire event has a family atmosphere, with carnival games and even a small ferris wheel. At noon the first day, there is an inaugural ceremony during which the gods are invited to the festival. On subsequent days, there are Chinese opera performances, as well as a procession honoring the god of birth and death. Toward the end of the festival, celebrants release turtles and fish to help carry away their sins, and launch floats with candles and flowers to pay respect to their ancestors and the gods. On the last full day, alms are given to the poor, and in the evening a large and colorful procession of worshippers headed by monks, drummers and a 12-person Chinese dragon circles the temple area three times to bid the gods farewell. Ceremonies at noon the next day close the festival. Throughout the festival, street vendors dole out seemingly endless quantities of one-plate vegetarian meals and traditional Chinese-style sweets. Most vendors specialize in one or two dishes. The most popular one-plate meals are noodle dishes. There are fried, round, chewy noodles of yellow wheat and thin rice noodles served with mushrooms, grated radish, tofu, Chinese kale and soy sauce; noodle dishes with mushrooms and faux meatballs made from wheat gluten; and noodle soups made with tofu or several varieties of mushrooms.

The snack foods at the festival include a variety of baked or deep-fried Chinese-style snacks filled with sweetened bean paste, coconut or taro root. There are also deep-fried egg rolls and vegetable fritters served with a sweet, spicy dipping sauce, as well as fried taro root pancakes. A vegetarian version of the popular Northeastern Thai/Lao green papaya salad, som tham, is also popular. It combines shredded papaya, lime juice, palm sugar, chili peppers, sliced tomatoes, green beans and julienned mushrooms, pounded together wooden mortar and pestle and served on a plate with fresh greens and balls of glutinous rice.

There are also vegetarian festivals in the southern Thai cities of Phuket and Trang. These festivals are even more exotic than Bangkok's, featuring acetic feats by young male followers, such as body piercing and climbing ladders of razors. The festival is also spreading throughout Bangkok. This year, there were yellow and red pennants with the Chinese symbol for kin jeh on restaurants and food vendors' carts all over the city. During the festival, many hotels and restaurants offer vegetarian buffets or add special vegetarian items to their menus. Some of the larger restaurants advertise these offerings in Thailand's English-language newspapers.

The festival is certainly the most exciting way to experience Thailand's vegetarian cuisine. But any time of year, delicious and inexpensive vegetarian food is fairly easy to find here. All you need is some persistence and a few Thai phrases.

The Chinese restaurants along Yaorat and Chaoen Krung roads are generally good places to look for vegetarian food. If it is not festival time, tell the waiter that you are a vegetarian: "khon kin jeh." Your food will be free of meat, eggs, dairy and fish sauce, and probably without garlic or onions as well. If a menu in English is not available (many places have them), you can usually order by pointing to the fresh ingredients that most restaurants prominently display, pantomiming which ingredients you do and don't want.
In addition to the Chinese-Thai vegetarian tradition, there is a vegetarian movement taking root in Thailand. The group behind this movement is called Santi Asoke, a back-to-basics Buddhist group founded in the 1970s that advocates a simple lifestyle, herbal medicine, vegetarianism and organic farming. Unlike most Buddhists in Thailand, Santi Asoke adherents take the Buddhist injunction against taking life as an exhortation not to eat meat or eggs. In contrast, most Thai Buddhists (monks included) believe that eating meat is not equivalent to "taking a life" - as long as they  didn't personally kill the animal. Santi Asoke has upset the mainstream Thai Buddhist hierarchy by criticizing mainstream Buddhism's tolerance of meat eating, gambling, drinking, prostitution and consumerism. In response, the Buddhist hierarchy challenged the legitimacy of the

Santi Asoke practices, forbidding the Santi Asoke monks from wearing Buddhist robes or even calling themselves Buddhists.

Despite their disdain for meat eating, Santi Asoke cooks make every attempt to replicate the texture of meat through the use of wheat gluten. Their restaurants and food shops, or sala mahansawalat, are increasingly popular. They are only open during the day, and are almost always packed. Food is served cafeteria-style and meals are cheap even by Thai standards: a bowl of noodles or a serving of food over rice costs about six baht (25 cents). They offer vegetarian versions of many Thai dishes, such as sweet-and-sour faux chicken with vegetables, or Northeastern Thai/Lao-style salad with chopped shallots, mint leaves, onions, chili peppers and faux chopped pork. These restaurants serve their meals with brown rice (most Thais like their rice as white as snow). Their curry pastes and spicy dipping sauces use a vegetarian "shrimp" paste made of fermented soy beans which looks and smells very much like the real thing.

In Bangkok, the largest Santi Asoke restaurant is on Kamphaengphet Road (behind the small city bus parking lot near the pedestrian bridge) just south and west of the large weekend market on the north side of town. There are also Santi Asoke restaurants in many other cities including Nakorn Pathom, Korat, Ubon Ratchatani and Chiang Mai.

Vegetarians can also eat their fill at a good vegetarian restaurant right around the corner from the main train station in Bangkok. Just walk east about 50 yards down Rama IV Road and you will find a small enclosed restaurant that offers only Chinese-style vegetarian food. Bangkok's many Indian restaurants all offer vegetarian dishes, as do most of the low-budget guesthouse restaurants. The Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in Bangkok has a vegetarian cafeteria that serves both Thai- and Western-style vegetarian food. There are also upscale restaurants in Bangkok and Chiang Mai that mainly cater to foreign vegetarians.

You won't go hungry in Thailand any time of the year. But if you have a spirit of adventure, come during the vegetarian festival. You'll be rewarded with authentic Thai vegetarian cookery unavailable anywhere else in the world. It's a countrywide festival of tastes.
Stephen Carroll was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand for two years. He now works as a baker in Kalamazoo, Mich.
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