Madness In The Middle Kingdom

also known as the Lantern Festival occurs on the 15th day of the First Month of the Chinese Year and marks the end of the New Year’s Holidays. In many neighbourhoods there are performances and celebrations that most certainly include fireworks and firecrackers of all kinds.

In addition it is customary to eat Yunxiao. Yuanxiao is the special food for the Lantern Festival. It is believed that Yuanxiao is named after a palace maid, Yuanxiao, of Emperor Wu Di of the Han Dynasty.

Yuanxiao is a kind of sweet dumpling, which is made with sticky rice flour filled with sweet stuffing and the Festival is named after the famous dumpling. It is very easy to cook - simply dump them in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes and they are eaten as a desert. Alice had them tonight but Carter, Nathan and I weren’t biting. The boys did have big helpings of Mantou (steamed buns) which is always a treat around the MaBrown household.

Anyway as mentioned the air is definitely filled with fireworks the likes of which no Western person could imagine. Starting this evening about 5 pm all over our suburb of Kai Fa Qu it sounded like a warzone with very very impressive displays of pyrotechnics … this has gone on for 4 or 5 hours and is beginning to lose some of its “charm”

If ya can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em –> at about 7 pm we joined the Englesons in lighting off some of our own fireworks to ring in the New Year. Carter got into the act and light off several himself

under the guidance of Mama of course

I was lucky enough to capture this shot of one of Craig’s fireworks

So how impressive do the firework displays get? Judge for yourself as I shot several minutes of footage right outside our apartment door. This was just one of thousands of sets going off around Kai Fa Qu tonight. This particular display raged for about 10 minutes and was quickly followed by another and another and another ….