Yi Peng & Loy Krathong

On the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, Chiang Mai holds the two festivals together. For Loy Krathong, people make or buy a krathong — a small float, traditionally of banana leaves and trunk, dressed with flowers, candles and incense, often with a clipping of hair or nail and a coin — and set it adrift on the Ping river and the city's waterways after dark, giving thanks to Phra Mae Khongkha, the goddess of water, asking pardon for the year's use and pollution of it, and floating away misfortune and ill feeling. For Yi Peng, the Lanna festival particular to the north, the khom loi — a paper hot-air lantern — is lit and released into the night sky carrying a wish or a worry let go, and the homes and temples are hung with lanterns and the krathong-style decorations. The two together fill Chiang Mai with light on water and light in the air, and the old city's temples hold processions, candlelit chanting and merit-making through the nights. Beyond the photographs the festivals are devotional acts of thanksgiving and release, rooted in Buddhist merit and in reverence for water. They are also the most visited entries in this catalogue, and that brings real friction: vast crowds, commercialised mass-release events sold to tourists, and a genuine hazard from sky lanterns — which are now banned within Chiang Mai's city limits and near the airport for fire and aviation safety, and may legally be released only at authorised venues outside the centre. The deeper experience is the local temple-and-river observance, not the staged mass release.