China’s ‘lantern capital’ busy preparing for Spring Festival
Print Edition
CAREFULLY steadying the gleaming red lantern between her knees, a worker applies the Chinese character for “wealth” in golden glitter — one of the millions that will illuminate the forthcoming Lunar New Year.
A high wooden arch at the entrance to the village of Tuntou, in north China’s Hebei Province, proclaims it the country’s “lantern capital.”
Bai Liwei, the village’s Party leader, tells reporters proudly: “80 to 90 percent of the lanterns used in China come from here.”
For the past two months, the town has been churning out the pumpkin-shaped lamps in preparation for the biggest holiday of the year in the world’s most populous country.
Spring Festival falls on February 8 this year and marks a time when far-flung family members return home for merriment and reunion banquets — according to tradition, they must be back by midnight on the eve of the new year.
Tuntou village has specialized in lantern-making for almost 40 years. It is not the site of enormous factories, instead the industry is driven by a number of private workshops in which families concentrate on the production of a single lantern element — their spindly metal frames, the exterior “skin” of fabric or silk, or the decorative inscriptions that include the Chinese characters for wealth, happiness, peace and family.
At the back of one assembly unit, high piles of nearly completed lanterns await processing, while workers wield wooden canes to lift others high off the ground to dangle delicately from the ceiling.
The color red symbolizes luck and happiness in Chinese culture, and the lanterns are omnipresent throughout towns and countryside, trotted out at most important occasions: marriages, business openings, and, most of all, Lunar New Year, which generally falls in late January or early to mid February.
“Outside of the peak holiday season, we also receive special requests: giant models, for example, or orders to decorate the Forbidden City in Beijing,” Bai said. “Tens of millions of lanterns are produced each year and all or almost all of them are sold. A portion is exported to Southeast Asia, the US or Japan. It’s become an economic pillar for the village.”
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