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The Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival, in Taiwan.It is widely regarded as one of the world's most dangerous festivals. The annual event commemorates a cholera epidemic more than a century ago, the fireworks symbolizing the exorcism of demons associated with the plague. Thousands of bottle rockets are fired directly into the crowd, who consider it good luck to be hit by them!

The most important of Yanshui's prominent fireworks are the so-called "bee hives", essentially multiple launchers of bottle rockets. These rocket forts are actually thousands of bottle rockets arranged row atop row in an iron-and-wooden framework. The setup looks like a beehive full of unleashed gunpowder. When the contraption is ignited, rockets shoot out rapidly in all directions...