Part 1: An idea thirty years in the making…
Please join hands across Chiang Mai to help the city put on an annual city-wide festival, tentatively titled Chiang Mai Festival City, with the aim of becoming one of the region’s greatest annual events held by all people of Chiang Mai for the benefit of the future of Chiang Mai. The current aim is to launch our first festival late next year.
The dream…
For nearly eighty years, Edinburgh city has worn the crown as the shining example of how a city can create, embrace and blossom from an annual festival city. Today many cities across the world are looking towards Edinburgh as a glowing example of success, with delegations from Australia’s Adelaide and Malta’s Valetta just two examples of cities which have successfully created their own international festivals, following their first delegation to visit Edinburgh Festivals years ago. Just this year alone there were three Asian delegations, including ours from Chiang Mai, who were welcomed to the Scottish capital in August to learn how it is done and how they too can take on Edinburgh’s best takes while learning from its mistakes. As the world’s leading celebration of arts and culture, Edinburgh Festivals 2003 attracted three million people to the windy Scottish city where around 3,500 shows were performed over 60,000 times, across hundreds of venues large and small, throughout the month of August bringing hundreds of millions of pounds into the economy. The impact of this annual festival on the city, and indeed Scotland as a whole, is vast and profound and something which Chiang Mai hopes to, in our own way, emulate (not to say that Edinburgh Festivals is without its challenges and many ensuing problems, which I will continue to address in this journal of my personal experience with the project as we – fingers crossed – proceed).