Does China have Carnival?
Not observed here
China has no pre-Lent carnival, and the Measures on National Annual Festivals and Commemorative Days contain no religious festival at all. The float parade as a form arrived by another route: the Shanghai Tourism Festival float parade began in 1993, is run by the municipal culture and tourism bureau, and is the longest-running and widest-reaching part of the festival — in 2024, twenty-five floats toured twelve districts including Huangpu, Jing'an, Putuo and Songjiang, covering some 1,800 kilometres. It falls in September, not February, and is driven by a city tourism administration rather than a church calendar: the same troupes and floats, packed into an entirely different institutional reason.
What is this topic?
Carnival is not a public holiday in Brazil. It is a *ponto facultativo* — a discretionary day off that the management ministry designates by decree each year for federal offices, with Ash Wednesday running only until two in the afternoon. The largest festival on earth has no statutory holiday status in its own country; it rests on an administrative order reissued every year. The United States turned it into a Louisiana state holiday, Japan moved it to August and dropped the fast, and Goa kept the form left behind by Portuguese rule.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.