by S. Swea
If you’re a whiz for riddles, have a sweet tooth, and love huge, mesmerizing displays of light and color, then Yuan Xiao might be the perfect cultural festival for you. The Spring Lantern Festival falls on the last day of Chinese New Year every year and is celebrated all around the world, from mainland China to virtually every state outside of it with a large enough diaspora. Let’s talk about it.
The Spring Lantern Festival gets its name, rather obviously, for its most marked feature: the hundreds and thousands of lanterns that are made, lit, and released during it. These lanterns are not only pretty to look at, but they also carry with them prayers and wishes for the new year ahead: prosperity, good health, luck in love, and so on. The traditional kongmingdeng, a floating lantern that is released into the sky on the night of Yuan Xiao, has four faces that can bear four wishes. Choose wisely!
During the Lantern Festival, apart from lighting lanterns (and reeling in the last of the year’s hongbao), other traditions include stilt-walking and dragon dance performances, playing riddle games and eating yuanxiao, sweet and chewy balls made from glutinous rice flour. Fun Fact One: the riddles written on the lanterns can be so stupefyingly difficult that they are known as “literary tigers”, and the act of guessing one “shooting the literary tiger”. Fun Fact Two: Yuan Xiao is often mistaken for the Mid-Autumn Festival, another Chinese cultural holiday that involves lanterns and rice balls, and yuanxiao are also often confused and/or conflated with the tangyuan served on the Winter Solstice. Unlike tangyuan, however, the spring variety of rice balls are made by rolling hard filling in rice flour until it becomes a thick ball rather than stuffing the filling into a pre-made “skin”. Either way, what is most important is that they are round, the same way reunion tables ought to be!
The Mid-Autumn Festival is associated with Chang’e and Hou Yi, the spring celebrations as a whole are associated with the nian… What’s the reason behind lighting lanterns in Yuan Xiao? As with most customs this old, there are many different versions of the tale. The most logical one is, of course, the simplest (hello, William of Occam): lighting lanterns to wish for prosperity is a custom that dates back to very long ago and grew to take on different cultural contexts across different time periods and their respective rulers. Personally, I prefer the more fantastical stories.
#1 Fire from the Heavens
One day nearing spring, a beautiful crane owned by the Jade Emperor descended to the mortal realm. Not knowing of the bird’s heavenly origins, the common people shot it down, drawing the Emperor’s ire. He gave the edict that on the fifteenth day of the lunar month, fire would rain down from the heavens and raze the land.
The Jade Emperor’s daughter heard this edict. She had a compassionate heart and could not bear to watch the commonfolk suffer, so that night she went into the mortal realm and whispered to every sleeping person: “A great fire will come on the fifteenth, it is better to light lanterns than to try and put it out. From the heavens, it is difficult to distinguish light from fire.”
A wise old man understood what the heavenly maiden meant: if they lit lanterns and made a lot of noise on the fifteenth, the Heavenly Emperor would mistakenly believe that the mortal realm was already on fire. Thus on the night of the fifteenth, everyone hung lanterns outside their homes, beat drums, and played with firecrackers and fireworks until very late. When the heavenly soldiers tasked with starting the fire came down, they were invited into the people’s homes to eat glutinous rice balls. The heavenly soldiers enjoyed these so much they forgot their duties entirely. (Kylie Jenner’s Pepsi ad is thus historically precedented.)
With this ingenious tactic, calamity was averted. Every year onwards, on this date, the common people would light lanterns in commemoration of the heavenly maiden’s benevolence.
#2 Fire from the Heavens, but Not Really
During the rule of the Emperor Wu of Han, there was a scholar-official named Dongfang Shuo who happened across a palace maid about to end her life out of homesickness. This maid was named Yuan Xiao, and she had not seen her family for a very long time. Dongfang Shuo promised her she would be able to see her family soon.
A few days later, Dongfang Shuo set up a fortune-telling stall on the street. Everyone who came to see him, however, received the same fortune: They would soon catch on fire and burn to death. Fearing this fate, the people did as Dongfang Shuo said and went to consult a fairy in red, who was actually Yuan Xiao in disguise. She tasked them with bringing a decree supposedly from the God of Fire to the Emperor. It said that on the fifteenth, the city would burn down.
At the advice of Dongfang Shuo, the Emperor ordered the people to make lanterns and set off fireworks all over the city on the fifteenth to convince the god of fire that it was already aflame. Where do the rice balls come in? Apparently, they were the God of Fire’s favorite dessert, so there was a citywide competition to see who could make the very best to appease the god.
Therefore on the fifteenth, thanks to the city-wide celebrations which everyone went out into the streets to attend, Yuan Xiao was able to reunite with her family. Because she also made the most delicious rice balls of the occasion, both the riceballs and the festivals were named after her. This story is my favorite simply because of how wholesome (not unlike yuanxiao themselves!) it is, and also I think makes a very effective argument for annual paid leave.
This year, Yuan Xiao fell on the 26th of February. What did you wish for?