Spring festival, Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year; call it what you will, it is China’s most important holiday. What the Chinese call it (those who speak Mandarin, that is) is Chun Jie (春节 | Chūnjié) and it’s the time of year that millions, hundreds of millions, Chinese go home to see their families, visit relatives, exchange gifts, and start the new year off with a bang by setting off industrial grade fireworks.

There is some dispute over when people started celebrating Chun Jie but it was somewhere between two and three thousand years ago. Chun Jie – which literally translates as ‘spring festival’ – is a fifteen day period that starts off the lunar year with a bang. Ancient China was one of many cultures that kept time with the lunisolar calendar which tracks the time of the solar year as well as the phases of the moon. The upshot is that Chun Jie starts on a different day every year, sometime between January 21st and February 20th. As a result, no one in China is ever very clear on when it’s going to be until a month or two before is starts; something that frustrates foreigners trying to get a better deal on plane tickets home by booking them well in advance.

In 2010 Spring Festival starts on the 14th of February and lasts for 15 days. The first five are the most important, the time when people do the bulk of their visiting with family and friends, and after that the cities slowly come back to life.

Spring Festival is celebrated by spending time with one’s family and friends. Big meals with large numbers of family members are common and the smaller family units usually go together to call on other friends and relatives and receive guests at their own homes.  As befits any proper holiday, there is a lot of eating, drinking, and chattering. Younger members of the family (those that have not yet graduated from college or reached that age) receive red envelopes called hong bao (红包 | hóng bāo) filled with cash from older relatives.

Though Chinese people don’t celebrate Chun Jie with large involved rituals, if you dig deeper into Spring Festival celebrations you’ll find that every action is imbued with symbolism. Much of it lies in the word play which is found in many Chinese customs. In northern China it is customary to start out the New Year by eating dumplings for breakfast because apparently the word for dumplings jiaozi (饺子 | jiǎozi) sounds like another Chinese word which means ‘bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new’. It seems that the Chinese gold ingots of days past were molded like modern day jiaozi so there’s an added, wealth related, layer of auspiciousness.

Southern Chinese eat niangao (年糕 | niángāo) a very glutinous, very chewy cake made out of rice flour, because the homophone of niangao means "higher and higher, one year after another.” Also niangao feels like it will be with you, stuck in your teeth, for much of the coming year.

 

 

Chun Jie is also the world’s largest annual migration. Last year 192 million people went home to visit their families and many ended up crammed in railway stations and threw the nation into turmoil. It is estimated that 250 million people will join the great migration this year.

Many stores and banks will be shut for the first week of Chun Jie or at least a couple of days so make sure you have a good supply of necessities like bottled water and electricity. That way if you run out of bottled water you can boil tap water and avoid more extreme measures. You’ll barely need lights at night because the fireworks exploding outside your window should give you enough light to read by – if you can still concentrate in what’ll seem like a warzone.

If you’ve ever been in combat and have trauma issues triggered by explosions you need to get out of China during Spring Festival. Fireworks, huge ones, are exploded everywhere, anytime, and by everyone. It’s not uncommon to wake up to firecrackers during the first few days of Chun Jie. Beijingers are still making up for time lost during the decade long fireworks ban by making the absolute best of the three days they are officially allowed to blow things up. It’s absolutely bananas. I’ve seen grown men, cigarettes in hand, helping small children light boxes of fireworks taller than they are. At eleven-thirty in the morning.

Chun Jie is not the best time to travel in China. Train tickets are impossible to get – the long lines you see now snaking out of little storefronts in China right now are people waiting to get train tickets - and if you manage to worm your way onto a train it’s going to be packed. I had one friend that ended up standing for 60 hours on the train back from Vietnam. He may never set foot on a train again. You may be best off getting out of the country, by plane, warming up in Thailand or relaxing in Japan. But Chun Jie is also the only time the big cities ever quiet down. Stay in town and you’ll find traffic moving quickly and the smog clouds lifting as quiet and calm gently blanket the city. Towards the end of the Spring Festival temple fairs take place, filling parks and thoroughfares with stalls full of jigsaw puzzles and Saddam masks and booths selling steaming cups of porridge and paper baskets of chou dofu. Above the crowds of revelers chatting and browsing the smell of spring rises, pungently.

Still planning to travel around China during Chun Jie? We’ve got information for you on attractions, lodging, and transportation in and out of 41 Chinese cities
 

Special Topic: Double Happiness: Spring Festival & Valentine's Day 2010

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