Tag Archives: Chinese Lantern Festival

NC Chinese Lantern Festival, 2020

Posted on December 25, 2020 | Leave a comment

This year, 2020, has been an unsettling year, burdened with covid-19 tragedies, leading up to a strange holiday season. As life got more constricted, large-scale gatherings fell by the wayside. Mid-autumn, our town announced that this year’s Chinese Lantern Festival, typically held during the shortest days of fall/winter in a large outdoor park, was reluctantly being canceled due to health and safety concerns. Bummer! Another feel-good event fallen victim to the scourge of covid-19.

For several previous years, winter evenings in our part of North Carolina had been brightened by the display of an abundance of LED-lit silk lanterns. The many lifelike or fanciful figures were variations on the traditional Chinese lanterns fabricated in a small Chinese city, Zigong, where the craft of lantern-making is centuries old. A Chicago-based affiliate helped organize American exhibits, which focussed ever more strongly on depictions of animals.

In late November, I finally got a glimmer toward a pandemic-adapted “new normal.” After eight months of closures or “take-out-only books,” our regional library reopened. The spacious new structure had opened only a year or so before the pandemic upended life as we’d known it. To operate safely with in-person patrons, it now incorporated health screenings and stricter limits on patron numbers at any given time. The third day after the reopening, I ventured downtown to the library, passed the screening questions and the temperature check, and got my first “fix” of in-person perusal of its extensive collection of both fiction and non-fiction titles. As I later walked outdoors nearby, I noticed that a small open space (where the old library had been) had a collection of inflatable figures, being blown nearly off their moorings on this windy day—a very scaled down holiday display. A week later, I ventured downtown again—to return some books.

Lo and behold, the flimsy figures in the open space had been replaced by a display of well-anchored, life-sized silk elephants, with a sign saying they were part of a diminished Chinese Lantern exhibit. I vowed to come back after dark to see them in their LED-infused glory. The display (one of seven, it turned out) had been positioned in a way that minimized the dangers of close contact. It was adorned with cautionary signs about social distancing, maximum numbers of people, and mask wearing. One weekday evening in December, my husband and I met a couple of local friends for a socially distanced ramble to see all of the animals—elephants, tigers, a rhino, red pandas, a bear and a jaguar, snakes, and eagles.

My husband thought he’d seen in an online article that the figures were “on loan” from a zoo in the Midwest. Once we tracked down an appropriate reference, we found that earlier in the year they’d been part of an exhibit at the Cleveland Zoo, so hadn’t needed to make the lengthy trip from Zigong in order to enthrall North Carolina audiences.

My hope is that the holiday season of 2021 will find the pandemic finally in our rear view mirror. Our town then may again be able to host a full version of the lantern festival. However, I think it’s heartening that even this year, though the lights may have been diminished temporarily, they haven’t been extinguished. Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy (upcoming) Year of the Ox!

Year of the Phoenix?

Posted on March 30, 2020 | Leave a comment

During the years’ shortest days for the past few years, an exhibit of lighted figures has come to our town—a multi-acre display of LED-illumined silk lanterns produced in the Chinese city of Zigong, in Sichuan province. Zigong’s artisans have long crafted lanterns for Chinese festivals. In recent decades they’ve gained global fame for their beautiful handiwork. Increasing numbers of U.S. cities are using winter-dormant park spaces to mount displays.

Our town display’s centerpiece is near the shoreline of a multi-acre lake: in prior years a magnificent dragon. When I attended this year’s 2019-2020 event just before (western) New Year, I wondered, as I wandered down a slope decorated with shapes of real and mythical animals, if the dragon had taken its accustomed place. No dragon, not this year. Instead, an equally impressive floating display of a mythical phoenix, complete with pulsing lights going from head to tail.

The night I saw the display, the weather was fairly mild for late December. Attendees from multiple cultural traditions mingled and oohed and aahed at the depiction of the fabulous bird. A little research about legends of the phoenix show the magic bird as a staple in the mythology of multiple civilizations, including Egyptian, Greek, and Chinese:

“In Asia the phoenix reigns over all the birds, and is the symbol of the Chinese Empress and feminine grace, as well as the sun and the south. The sighting of the phoenix is a good sign that a wise leader has ascended to the throne and a new era has begun. It was representative of Chinese virtues: goodness, duty, propriety, kindness and reliability. Palaces and temples are guarded by ceramic protective beasts, all led by the phoenix.” ( https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/ancient-symbolism-magical-phoenix-002020 ; accessed 2020/03/27)

In mid-January, our town’s lantern display was packed up to return to Zigong. It was nearly time for Chinese New Year (or “Spring Festival,” celebrated in 2020 starting on January 25). The upcoming Chinese year would start another cycle of the 12-animal Chinese zodiac, which includes the dragon, along with eleven other real-life animals (in sequence: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig). So far, the phoenix has not become part of the Chinese zodiac, though the mythic bird is often considered the feminine counterpart to the masculine dragon.

Now that covid-19 has become a global pandemic, I’ve been asked, like many people all over the world, to self-isolate at home to reduce the speed of the virus’s spread. This will allow health care systems more time to adapt by “flattening the curve” of new infections. If I’m bored, it’s a small price to pay for a larger social good. The next generation in our family includes two members of hospital medical staffs. Their safety is a big concern.

This enforced time at home gives me license to engage in reveries about the mythical bird. Many legends of the phoenix depict it as an extremely long-lived creature who senses approaching death, builds her own funeral pyre, and then dies in fiery majesty. Shortly afterwards, the next generation of phoenix rises from the ashes.

What might the symbol of the phoenix mean as 2020 begins with a global pandemic—the death of an overly competitive ethos and the dawning of an age of more thorough global cooperation? a rethinking of our interlocking systems of education, health care, corrections, and social welfare? a reining in of our preoccupation with material wealth? renewed reverence for the natural world that supports us all?

Let’s hope that 2020 will turn out to be a year of the phoenix.

Phoenix lantern at NC Chinese Lantern Festival

Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, 2009

Posted on March 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

Lantern Festival marks the end of the formal Spring Festival holiday. It occurs on the night of the full moon, two weeks after Chinese New Year (Spring Festival). In 2009, for me it came near the end of a travel-filled interval spent in various parts of Sichuan, Chongqing, and Guangxi. Lantern Festival in Yangshuo would be my last hurrah before retracing my steps to return to my teaching post in Sichuan for second semester.

Yangshuo, Guangxi is a “backpackers’ paradise,” a formerly smallish town along the Li River south of Guilin that has over the past couple of decades gotten a huge influx of tourism. The town sits among lovely karst formations that have started to attract serious rock climbers. Having benefited (or suffered, depending on your perspective) from successive sets of outdoor-oriented expatriates who came, saw, loved, and settled in it, Yangshuo has a much more international flavor than most Chinese towns its size. While wandering its streets one afternoon, I even saw and heard at a distance a dark-skinned American man, a most unusual sight in any Chinese town I’d been in before.

My husband Jim and I spent the night of Lantern Festival in Yangshuo, at the West Street Hotel, a wooden structure with balconies overlooking the main tourist street. The previous spring, Jim and a hiking companion had lodged there briefly and found it adequate and reasonably priced. It was sort of a “Trapp Family Lodge with Chinese Characteristics.” Our room came with a Western-style bathtub, with exposed pipes running to it from the solar hot water heater on the roof. Yangshuo, in addition to its rock climbing appeal, is also the site of several backpackers’ hostels and a center for area hiking and bicycling. It is the southern terminus of most Li River cruises. Cruise passengers may opt to stay overnight and get a “Western” breakfast at one of the local restaurants catering to tourists, but most board buses for a same-day return to Guilin. Any foreign visitors, however long their stays, got to run a gauntlet of souvenir hawkers and local craft shops. We could view a staged demonstration of the early stages of silk production. We could attend concerts or dramas. Nearly everywhere, there was an abundance of English signage.

As dusk fell on Lantern Festival Day, the streets filled with revelers, the sky once again filled with fireworks. Nearly every building had decorated lanterns hanging from its eaves. Some were plain spheres of red paper. Others were decorated with riddles, or crafted into animal shapes. We watched from our balcony as two small “wishing lanterns” rose amid the fireworks displays. They were not attached to anything, and were dwarfed by the other displays as they drifted skyward.

Later in the school year, a student would present us with such a lantern as a gift, so we got to see one close up. Our gift lantern was collapsible, with thin metal rings at the top and the bottom. Each ring had several slots where straight pieces of metal or wood could be inserted to form something like a lampshade. The exterior was made of shiny red paper, which covered the sides and the top. The bottom ring was open, with a smaller ring at its center, into which the wisher would insert a stubby paraffin candle. To use a wishing lantern, one first made a silent wish, then lit the candle and held the lantern up to the sky. After a little while, the air inside the lamp would heat and draw the lantern upward.

During our Spring Festival travels, we’d seen other wish lanterns here and there. The greatest concentrations, though, came closest to the evening of Lantern Festival. I’ve heard that use of the lanterns has lately been discouraged because of fire danger and the dangers to structures and livestock—no one can ever be sure where a lantern will come down, or whether its candle will have burned out by the time it does.

Had I lit a wishing lantern in Yangshuo, I’d have wished for a peaceful end of life for my mother-in-law, who was in her late 90’s and suffering from a variety of illnesses and ailments. Earlier in the holiday, my brother-in-law had emailed us that she was suffering from pneumonia and had again been hospitalized near their New England home. Perhaps some benign spirit heard my wish anyway—she died peacefully a couple of weeks later.