Latern Festival in China – a fest for street photographers

One thing I recommend warmly to street photographers is the Chinese new years festival and particularly the lantern festival . The lantern festival marks the end and a highlight of the Chiense new years celebrations. The streets are decorated colorful, millions of lanterns are shining and a giant firework is done by the people. Details of the lantern festival are available at Wikipedia.

Like in most parts of the western world, fireworks in China have their original sense in driving away evil spirits by making threatening noise. In contrast to the western world the firecrackers are ignited over the whole evening until around midnight.

Both private individuals and companies are organizing fireworks. Companies do that as a good sign for their employees. It’s serves as a symbol for driving “evil spirits” out of the company.

We were invited by a company in Lanzhou and we were able to enjoy their fireworks sitting in their VIP area.
Carefully staged on a place of this company they ignited around 3000 rockets 200.000 firecrackers and some extra stuff. Gigantic! But it was only a small part of what was visible in the sky of Lanzhou that night.

However, as breathtaking as such fireworks may be, I also like the idea to making better use of resources that would be put into fireworks. This is a thought that has been growing over the last 30 years in the western world.

For instance, the German charity “Brot statt Böller” (Food instead of Firecrackers) collects money for African street kids sinse 1982. This is money that otherwise would have gone into fireworks. And any waiver of fireworks helps our environment – which is absolutely in need.

It could well be that this sort of thinking over the next couple of year is also getting popular in China. That would be a good thing. However, this is why I suggest to our street photographers to point their lenses onto the lantern festival as long as it is still celebrated in this magnificent glory.

For your conveniance I listed the the upcoming dates according to the Chinese lunar calender here:

Good light!

-- Michael