ICH celebrations light up Lantern Festival across China Global Times

Visitors enjoy the Tianjin Drum Tower New Year Lantern Festival in North China's Tianjin, on February 3, 2025. Photo: VCG

With the upcoming Lantern Festival, which falls on Wednesday in 2025, cities across China are pulling out all the stops to celebrate it with a variety of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) festivities, from traditional dragon and lion dances to vibrant molten iron fireworks shows and immersive lantern events.

The Lantern Festival, falling on the 15th day of the first month of the traditional Chinese calendar, has long been a time for people to hang colorful lanterns, play riddle games, and express wishes for a prosperous year ahead. 

The year 2025 marks the first Lantern Festival celebrations after the Spring Festival was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. A special focus has been placed on preserving and promoting China's rich intangible cultural heritage at the event, adding a new layer of meaning to the celebrations.

One of the highlights of the festival in the capital is the lighting up of Beijing's iconic Temple of Heaven, where a large-scale lantern display will welcome visitors. At 2 pm on the day of the Lantern Festival, the park will host a series of activities including 24 grand palace lanterns, each symbolizing a different Chinese solar term. 

Visitors will also experience a lively ICH market in the park, filled with the hustle and bustle of traditional crafts. Among the nine featured ICH activities is sugar figurines, which visitors can try their hand at making. Notably, lantern-making experts will guide tourists in crafting their own lanterns while introducing the long history of palace lanterns.

At the Universal Theaters Dream Langfang in Langfang, North China's Hebei Province, a lantern event featuring the stunning debut of ICH box lanterns, alongside a variety of other activities, including lantern riddle-solving games, will be held on the day of the Lantern Festival, the Global Times learned from the organization.

In Shigang village in East China's Jiangxi Province, a wooden-bench dragon dance was held on Monday to celebrate the upcoming Lantern Festival. Over 400 sections of wooden benches were arranged to form a nearly 700-meter-long "wooden dragon." As the dragon meandered through the village, the community prayed for favorable weather and bumper harvest in the year to come. 

In Qionghai, South China's Hainan Province, the Longjiang Lantern Festival, one of the most cherished traditional celebrations in the region, will take place from the 13th to the 15th of the first lunar month. The lantern display, a long-standing tradition dating back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), has been officially recognized as a representative project of the province's intangible cultural heritage.

In addition to various ICH activities, the folk customs of enjoying lantern displays and tasting yuanxiao, sweet rice dumplings, during the Lantern Festival have also been preserved.

"Historically, well-known lantern fairs, including the Shanghai Yuyuan Lantern Fair, were iconic, but today there are also new displays like the Harbin ice sculptures and the Yellow River lantern array," Xiao Fang, head of the Department of Anthropology and Folklore Studies at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times. "These traditions not only reflect ancient seasonal customs, but also embody the simple wishes of our ancestors."

For example, some children are now using electric-powered lanterns, replacing traditional paper and flame versions. "These modern innovations allow more people to participate in the celebrations while retaining the essence of traditional customs, offering a new way to celebrate and wish everyone a prosperous year ahead," said Xiao.

In addition to lantern fairs, eating yuanxiao is also a customary practice during the festival. In addition to traditional sweet-flavored rice dumplings, snake-themed yuanxiao for the Year of the Snake, as well as featured dumplings inspired by the popular movie Ne Zha 2, are also highly popular.