The Lantern Festival
Yesterday it was the Lantern Festival or 元宵节 yuanxiaojie. This festivity marks the official end of the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival and it is celebrated with fireworks and lantern displays. It is also customary to guess riddles and eat glutinous rice balls (汤圆 tangyuan) filled with meat, sesame or red bean paste.
I didn’t eat glutinous rice balls this time because my fridge was full of other more perishable foods. Last week C.’s company gave each employee a bag with a lot of packets of these balls, frozen. They can also be made at home, but C. laughs in my face every time I mention making dumplings (“No one makes their own dumplings in Suzhou”, he says), so I’m sure he doesn’t know how to make rice balls either. However, I wanted to go and see the lanterns.
“In all these years you never took me to see the lanterns”, I said with my best pouty face. Said and done! In the evening we went to Xietang Old Street, a fake old street with a lantern display not too far from home. With fake old street I mean a street that is new, but was built imitating the classic Suzhou style with canals, white houses and black roofs. It looks pretty much like the real deal, except, of course, that you know it isn’t. And that all the houses are in fact restaurants and shops.
It was crowded but still bearable. You can see below some of the displayed lanterns. I touched one of them when no one was looking and they seemed to be made with silk or some similar cloth. After all, silk is abundant in Suzhou and if they were made of paper they would be ruined by the rain.
All the pictures were taken with my mobile phone as my camera takes horrible pictures at night. Sorry about the quality!
Fish symbolize abundance (because both words have the same pronounciation).
One of the main themes this year was monkeys, of course! Mabel would have been delighted :D
The biggest lantern covered a whole bridge and it was about Journey to the West.
Here you can see the size of the lanterns.
Those are some magnificent lanterns! Yes, I looovvveeee the monkey ones. It is so clever how the monkeys are arranged – dropping down from the tree with each other, and is that a pot of luck at the bottom? :D In the second monkey photo, it looks like the monkeys are flying in the sky! I wonder if that was the artists’ intentions.
C. said they were pulling the moon but now that you mention it I didn’t really understand it, I will ask him.
The second monkey is the Monkey King from Journey to the West, it looks like he is flying because his boots were black!
Oooo, pulling the moon. I’ve heard of that tradition and now that you mention it, the monkeys do look like they are doing that. As a kid, I loved watching Journey to the West and no surprise who my favourite character is :D
Xietang Old Street is pretty funny. So fake but I still like it. It looks cool and they have interesting decorations for the major holidays.
I’ve always thought those rice balls were nasty – my least favorite holiday food – until I had the real deal in Ningbo last week. They were sooooo good. I was shocked. Much, much better than the frozen version.
I already love the frozen ones so the real deal must be heaven, haha!
I’m not sure about Xietang Old Street. Does anyone go there when it’s not holidays? Is it going to end up as deserted as most parts of Ligongdi?
Yeah, heavenly. Order another round because they we so crazy good. I like ligongdi too. I pretty much just go for walks and would never shop in those places. They just look cool.
No tangyuan for us since we left Finland :(
It is incredible what effect so many lanterns have. It looks for sure wonderful like from some kind of movie!
It reminded me of Fallas, the famous holiday from Valencia where they make sculptures in the street and then burn them… except that in here they didn’t burn them.
Gorgeous! Worth the wait. Isn’t it crazy how you can live in a city and take forever to get around to all the tourist attractions/ yearly celebrations?
I’ve yet to see the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, even though I once lived right off the parade route. Apparently I need to break out my pouty face.
The pouty face works like magic, try it! And yes, I totally agree. When I studied in Granada back in Spain it took me 3 or 4 years to visit the Alhambra. And now in Suzhou, there are still some places I haven’t been!
Tang yuan! : )_____
¡Seguro que en los supermercados chinos los venden congelados! En Valencia había supermercados chinos por todas partes.
Ya compré en China congelados. Pero a mí me gustan los del Ding Tai Fun y los de otros restaurantes finos.
Es que tú eres una chica muy fina, jaja. Tía, hace unos meses abrieron un ding tai fung a 10 minutos andando de mi casa y todavía no he ido…
Those lanterns are beautiful. I didn’t do anything to celebrate this year. And I think my husband is secretly happy because I am not dragging him to the lantern festival this year [but I might change my mind yet].
Haha! So this year your husband will also have a rest :D
You guys are doing totally different things compared to us in Malaysia. I guess we have been doing it wrong all the while then! Here, 元宵节 is also called 华人情人节 Chinese Valentine’s Day. We will go to the river where single girls will 抛柑 throw mandarin oranges (written with their name and contact number/Facebook on the skins) and single guys will pick those floating oranges. And then… you know the drill…
When I said “we”, I mean “Malaysians, excluding me” because I’m a boring sod who prefers to sleep at home.
I saw in Wikipedia about the Chinese Valentine. It must be some old tradition that got completely lost here because I never heard about it before. In China their Valentine’s day is on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month.
Lovely! So impressed with the fish one and the monkeys, too. Of course, CHINA
*ahem* as I was saying…
CHINA has got to be king of lanterns, right?
Hahaha! Not sure! Do they have them in other places apart than China and Taiwan?
I think all over Asia there is some form a lantern festival.
These lanterns are fabulous, like Mabel I loved the hanging monkeys; how clever.
This year we are probably going to have monkeys everywhere, being the year of the monkey!
Que hermosooo!
Yo curiosamente cuando fui a China no vi de estas, pero acá a Chile una vez vino Dreamworks con una exposición de figuras así pero de los personajes de Shrek, Madagascar, etc. Era muy muy lindo! Pero quedé impresionada con la del puente que mostraste, es hermoso!
Saludos
Oooh! Yo nunca he visto cosas parecidas fuera de China (o Taiwan).
Holy crap, those lanterns are beautiful. Watching the children in my little 小区 running around with their cute lanterns made me nostalgic for the time when I was their age, running around with my little paper lanterns!
This year is the first year in a long time that I’ve actually had 汤圆 on 元宵节. I’m generally not a big fan of it. I mean, I’ll eat it, but it’s not like I’d make the extra effort to actually make some!
I have never tried to make them either! Frozen ones to the rescue, haha.
Love the monkey ones! But then I’m biased. Mobile camera phones are great for night photos and these look amazing!
The mobile camera is definitely better than my camera for night pics, haha.
Wow! So elaborate!
Yeah it must have taken quite some time to create and then assembly everything!
Nice photos. I’ve never actually touched one of these lanterns but I think silk makes for an interesting, and fitting for Suzhou, as you said, choice of material for those.
I was afraid they would be made of paper and become a mess with the rain! Silk is very appropriate for Suzhou, yes, haha.
Lovely photos I never knew lanterns could be that big… gorgeous.
They are lanterns 2.0! They can be as big as the artist wants them to be ;)
Wow, they’re fabulous.. I am fascinated by Chinese culture.