>> home>>Hotels>>Chinese Spring Festival Celebrations in Guangzhou

The upcoming Chinese New Year (also known as Spring Festival) falls on January 26, 2009, when we’ll be ringing in the Year of the Ox. This is the most enthusiastically celebrated festivals in China.

Guangzhou celebrates the New Year with as much enthusiasm as the rest of the country and offers a vibrant and exiting atmosphere that can be enjoyed by visitors and residents alike. People will pay visits to friends and relatives to exchange gifts, make a trip to temples to pray for good fortune for the coming year, and there is frenzied shopping and a lot of bustling around town. Since Guangzhou is the “heaven to gastronomists”, many food streets are open to serve various traditional Chinese food during the festival.

Guangzhou enjoys the reputation of the “City of Flowers” and is known for the Flower Fair held annually during the Spring Festival. The streets are decorated with fragrant and beautiful fresh flowers, golden tangerines, and elegant miniature landscapes, looking like rivers of flowers in the distance. It is customary for most of the families to visit the fair after the reunion dinner on the New Year’s Eve, which is the climax of flower market. People usually buy a potted tree with tangerines hanging on it. The tangerine symbolizes good luck and wealth to the local people and the chrysanthemum symbolizes longevity.

The annual Fireworks Display on the evening of the first day of the Chinese Spring Festival is another highlight. Colorful fireworks light up the sky over Pearl River in Guangzhou to welcome the Lunar New Year. The display starts around 8:30 p.m. and lasts for about 30 minutes. Tens of thousands of people will turn out to watch the resplendent fireworks show. The sound of fireworks exploding is thought to scare away bad spirits and promote luck.

As everywhere in China, Lantern Festival in Guangzhou takes place on 5th of the first lunar month to usher in a coming harvest year and compete against the moonlight. The city is decorated with varieties of lanterns and some are graced with exhibitions of flowers, fruit pots, fine arts and photography in addition to lantern riddles. The Guangzhou Lantern Festival held in Yuexiu Park, Memorial Park to the Martyrs and the Guangzhou Cultural Park, serves as an exhibition of folk lantern art. Citizens hang lanterns at home while children play lanterns on streets in celebration of the festival.