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Lantern Festival

Lantern Festival

How the world celebrates

The same lunar date is three different scenes in Taiwan alone — eating tangyuan and walking through a lantern display, releasing sky lanterns in Pingxi, or standing inside a wall of exploding fireworks in Yanshui — while in mainland China it is a working day, not one of the days off for all citizens.

Quick answers

How do places mark it?
PlaceWhen is it?How the date is set
United StatesNot observed hereNot on the official list
Taiwan · 鹽水蜂炮February 19, 2027 – February 20, 2027Estimated dateThe 14th to 15th day of the first lunar month, Wumiao Temple procession in Yanshui District, Tainan City
Taiwan · 元宵節（上元節）February 20, 2027The 15th day of the first lunar month.
Taiwan · 平溪天燈節February 20, 2027Estimated dateOne or two days before or after the Lantern Festival, in the Shifen and Jingtong areas of Pingxi District, New Taipei City.
China · 元宵节February 20, 2027The 15th day of the first lunar month; not included among the holidays on which all citizens get a day off
Taiwan · 臺東炮炸寒單爺February 20, 2027 – February 21, 2027Estimated dateThe 15th and 16th day of the first lunar month, Taitung City
China · 秦淮灯会（南京）February 20, 2027Estimated dateDuring the period from the Spring Festival to the Lantern Festival, around the Fuzimiao (Confucius Temple) area in Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province
IndonesiaFebruary 20, 2027Estimated dateThe 15th day of the first lunar month (the fifteenth night counted from Imlek)
BrazilNot observed hereNot on the official list
IndiaNot observed hereNot on the official list
JapanNot observed hereNot on the official list

World questions on this topic →

🗳️ What about you?

Asked by the 🇺🇸 English community

For the 🇹🇼 中文(台灣) community

On the fifteenth night after Lunar New Year, is there a lantern event where you are?

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      How the world celebrates

      • February 19, 2027– February 20, 2027Local dateEstimated date

        How does Taiwan mark Lantern Festival? · 鹽水蜂炮

        In Yanshui, Tainan, the 'beehive fireworks' run on the 14th and 15th of the first lunar month, centred on a procession from the Yanshui Wu Temple. It traces back to a cholera outbreak in 1885, when local merchants and worshippers resolved to carry the palanquin of Guan Sheng Dijun through the streets and drive out the plague with firecracker smoke. Residents build 'fireworks fortresses' packed with rockets; once lit, the rockets fly in every direction while the palanquin turns inside the sparks. It was registered as a local folk custom in 2008.

        taiwangods.moi.gov.tw ↗

      • February 20, 2027Local date

        How does Taiwan mark Lantern Festival? · 元宵節（上元節）

        In Taiwan the Lantern Festival falls on the 15th day of the first lunar month and closes the lunar new-year season. The common parts are eating tangyuan, carrying lanterns, guessing lantern riddles, and visiting a city or county lantern display. It is not a public holiday, so most people work or attend school as usual and the festival happens after hours and at weekends. How far people take it varies: one pot of tangyuan for some, a cross-county trip for others. The lantern night closes the whole stretch of the lunar new year: once the fifteenth of the first month has passed, the year is properly over, work resumes and school starts. It is not a day off, yet it is the evening on which the whole island lights up at once — beyond carrying lanterns, guessing lantern riddles and eating the round dumplings, the national lantern festival is hosted by a different county or city each year, so where it is this year is a question that has to be asked afresh every time.

        law.moj.gov.tw ↗hko.gov.hk ↗

      • February 20, 2027Local dateEstimated date

        How does Taiwan mark Lantern Festival? · 平溪天燈節

        Sky lanterns are released in Pingxi, New Taipei, within a day or two of the Lantern Festival, concentrated in the Jingtong, Pingxi, and Shifen areas. Each lantern is a bamboo frame covered in paper, lifted by hot air from burning joss paper, and people usually brush a wish onto the paper before letting go. The lanterns began as safety signals and only later became a wish-making rite. The Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival was registered as intangible cultural heritage of New Taipei City in 2008.

        taiwangods.moi.gov.tw ↗

      • February 20, 2027Local date

        How does China mark Lantern Festival? · 元宵节

        Mainland China keeps the same date and much of the same practice — yuanxiao or tangyuan, and lantern viewing — but the festival is not among the days off for all citizens in the national holiday regulation, so the 15th is a working day. Lantern displays and temple fairs are arranged locally, and their scale, or whether they happen at all, differs by city rather than following a nationwide holiday.

        gov.cn ↗hko.gov.hk ↗

      • February 20, 2027– February 21, 2027Local dateEstimated date

        How does Taiwan mark Lantern Festival? · 臺東炮炸寒單爺

        Taitung's bombardment of Master Handan is fixed to the fifteenth and sixteenth days of the first lunar month. It arose in Taitung City around 1951: in 1949 residents brought three statues, including Handan, up from the south and kept them in a private home, with worshippers taking turns to host them — no temple was ever built. Who Handan is has several accounts: the martial god of wealth Zhao Gongming; a local strongman taking the firecrackers as atonement; or a plague god to be driven off with them. The practice disappeared elsewhere in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, leaving Taitung as the only postwar survival, listed as folk cultural heritage of Taitung County in 2007.

        taiwangods.moi.gov.tw ↗

      • February 20, 2027Local dateEstimated date

        How does China mark Lantern Festival? · 秦淮灯会（南京）

        The Lantern Festival in mainland China is not only 'the day nobody gets off' — it also has local versions listed on the national register in their own right. The Qinhuai Lantern Fair in Nanjing, Jiangsu, also called the Jinling Lantern Fair, runs across the stretch from Spring Festival to the Lantern Festival and was named in the first batch of national intangible heritage in 2006. Records place lantern fairs in Nanjing as far back as the Southern Dynasties, said to be the finest in the country; the saying that Qinhuai's lanterns were the best under heaven followed the Hongwu Emperor's promotion of the festival in Nanjing in the early Ming. Historically spread along the Qinhuai River, it concentrated around the Confucius Temple in the twentieth century, with the core area now taking in the Confucius Temple, Zhan Garden and Bailuzhou Park.

        ihchina.cn ↗

      • February 20, 2027Local dateEstimated date

        How does Indonesia mark Lantern Festival?Cap Go Meh

        Indonesia's fifteenth night is called Cap Go Meh — the Hokkien for "fifteenth evening", meaning the fifteenth night after Lunar New Year. The largest is in Singkawang, West Kalimantan, and its centre is not the lantern but the Tatung: people held to be possessed by ancestral spirits, carried through the streets and pierced with blades without bleeding. It is entered, together with the Tatung, on the national register of intangible cultural heritage. Read this cell beside Taiwan's and China's and the point is clear: the same fifteenth night, lanterns and riddles on one side, procession and possession on the other.

        bimasbuddha.kemenag.go.id ↗

      • Not observed hereLocal date

        Does Brazil have Lantern Festival?

        There is no Lantern Festival in Brazil. The federal holidays are fixed by Law 662 of 1949, with 12 October added by Law 6.802 of 1980; religious days are devolved by Law 9.093 of 1993 to the municipalities, declared by municipal law and capped at four. Nothing in that design leaves room for a lunar festival, and the Lunar New Year celebrations in São Paulo's Liberdade district carry on because of the city and the community, not because of the holiday table.

        www2.camara.leg.br ↗camara.leg.br ↗

      • Not observed hereLocal date

        Does India have Lantern Festival?

        India has no Lantern Festival, but it has festivals of light of its own, and more than one: Diwali at the end of autumn, Kartik Purnima on the full-moon night, and Karthigai Deepam in the south in November or December. India's holiday tables are, by construction, lists of religious festivals settled between the states and the centre, and what gets in is the local calendar, not another country's lunar one. So the point of this cell is not that a festival of lights is missing, but that here the festivals of light queue up by a different calendar.

        india.gov.in ↗

      • Not observed hereLocal date

        Does Japan have Lantern Festival?

        There is no Lantern Festival in Japan, and the reason is not about whether Chinese communities are present: from the sixth year of Meiji the country moved to the solar calendar, and the old-calendar festivals were shifted wholesale onto the same numbered day of the new one. The fifteenth of the first month therefore became 15 January — a date now remembered as the old Coming-of-Age Day, with nothing to do with lanterns. Not one of the sixteen holidays in the Act follows the phases of the moon. The lantern events in the Yokohama and Kobe Chinatowns run as usual, but they belong to those neighbourhoods, not to the holiday table.

        www8.cao.go.jp ↗

      • Not observed hereLocal date

        Does United States have Lantern Festival?

        There is no Lantern Festival in the United States. The federal holidays number eleven, fixed by act of Congress, and nothing on that list follows the moon — every one is either a fixed month-and-day or an nth Monday. That alone decides why a lunar festival cannot get in: a date that drifts each year is at odds with a system designed to pin holidays to Mondays for three-day weekends. The Lunar New Year parades in San Francisco and New York go ahead as always, but they are put on by cities and communities, not by the holiday list.

        usa.gov ↗

      Sources and dates

      Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.