Chinese new year finishes with Lantern Festival

Traditionally, the last night of the Chinese new year celebrations, Lantern Festival is another opportunity to set the skies and streets alight with thousands of fireworks.

Fireworks light up the Beijing Drum Tower

We went out for a great dinner - My Humble House - a beautifully designed Chinese fusion restaurant in the Oriental Plaza complex and then for a walk to Tiananmen Square to see what was happening. We though there would celebrations going on but even though there were plenty of people out and about the square was shut off and nobody allowed on. That is a rare sight in itself.

Coming home, the streets and pavements were a sea of red firecracker fragments as families and friends set off huge boxes of fireworks on street corners. One child was happily sitting on top of a giant, ready to be used, box of fireworks which, his mother told us with great pride, contained 100 rockets.
View across to an empty Tienanmen Sq with Great Hall of the People in the background on Lantern Festival

Beijing prepares for Year of the Rat

Goodbye Year of the Pig, hello Year of the Rat. Celebrations will be in full swing across China on the night of February 6th as the new year is ushered in and the Spring Festival begins.

Beijing's parks are a focal point of these celebrations and tens of thousands of people will visit them every day for several weeks strolling around, enjoying the decorations, eating, drinking and playing games at the fairground hawker stands that will be set up.

Ditan Park, in the centre of town, is one of the city's prettiest parks. It was built in the 1500s as the Temple of Earth and at its centre is the square, moated altar that was used for the emperor's sacrifices. It hosts one of Beijing's best temple fairs during Spring Festival but we strolled along its nearly empty paths this weekend to watch the decorations going up. Thousands of red lanterns are used to decorate the park and gangs of fearless workers scrambled up the tall trees to place them.

'Year of the Rat' doesn't sound nearly as cuddly or friendly as Year of the Pig. But in Mandarin the word for rat and for mouse are the same - 鼠 (shǔ ) and, I guess, we have a better image of mice (Jerry) than rats (Pied Piper)