Lantern Festival: lanterns, riddles and tangyuan

The Lantern Festival, 元宵节 (Yuánxiāo Jié), falls on the 15th day of the first month of the Chinese calendar, the night of the first full moon of the lunar year. In the Gregorian calendar it usually comes in February or early March. It closes the New Year cycle: it is the last day of the Spring Festival (春节) celebrations.

The name is easy to read: 元 (yuán) means "first" and 宵 (xiāo) means "night". The festival is also called 上元节 (Shàngyuán Jié), 元夕 (yuánxī) or simply 灯节 (dēngjié), "the lantern festival".

The name 上元, "first yuan", comes from a Daoist division of the year into three: the 15th of the first month (上元) is the birthday of the Official of Heaven (天官), while the 15th of the seventh month (中元) and the 15th of the tenth month (下元) belong to the Officials of Earth and of Water.

In many regions, three things come back: eating glutinous rice balls, admiring lanterns and solving the riddles hung on them.

Traditional explanations are many, and they do not agree. Three accounts come up most often:

• the cult of Taiyi (太一), a heavenly god whom Emperor Wu of Han (汉武帝) had worshipped at Ganquan (甘泉) all night long, by the light of fires. The Shiji (史记), in its chapter on music, does describe a night rite that lasted "from dusk until dawn", but places it on the first xin day (上辛) of the first month, not on the 15th;

• Buddhist lamps: Emperor Ming of Han (汉明帝), a supporter of Buddhism, is said to have had lamps lit on the evening of the 15th of the first month in honour of the Buddha;

• the Daoist Shangyuan festival, the birthday of the Official of Heaven, celebrated by lighting lamps.

The doubt is not new. In 1635, the Dijing jingwu lüe (帝京景物略), a description of Ming-dynasty Beijing, already reviewed these accounts: it recalled the Taiyi rite "from dusk to dawn", noted that the Buddhist festival being invoked, the "Great Miracle" (大神变) of the Western Regions, fell in the twelfth month, and dated the lanterns of the 15th of the first month to the early Tang: under Emperor Ruizong (睿宗), a foreigner asked to light a thousand lamps, and the emperor came to watch them from the Anfu Gate (安福门).

Under the Tang, the festival grew. Normally, a curfew forbade moving about at night; but for the full moon of the first month, the imperial guard (金吾) lifted the curfew. The poet Su Weidao (苏味道) thus sings of a night of the 15th when "fire trees and silver flowers join" and "the guard does not forbid the night". Under Emperor Xuanzong (玄宗), the custom became a rule: three nights, from the 14th to the 16th, without curfew, with markets open by lamplight.

Each dynasty then made the festival longer. According to the Dijing jingwu lüe, the Northern Song went up to five nights by adding the 17th and the 18th, the Southern Song to six, and the founder of the Ming (太祖) had his first capital, in the south, lit up for ten days. In the Yongle era (永乐), officials were given ten days off for the festival; by the time the book appeared they had only five.

In Beijing, the lantern market was then held from the 8th to the 17th of the first month and stretched for two li east of the Donghua Gate (东华门). It offered lanterns of gauze in five colours, of horn, paper or wheat straw, shaped like flowers, birds, beasts, insects or fish; there was music, acrobats and fireworks. By day it was a market; by night, until morning, it was a place for lanterns.

On the night of the festival, houses hang up lanterns and children go out carrying paper lanterns. Once fairly plain, except for those of the emperor and the nobles, they now come in every shape, animals included.

Hanging riddles on lanterns is a tradition that goes back to the Song. The idea has hardly changed: the riddle is written on a slip of paper stuck to the lantern; whoever thinks they have the answer takes the slip off and has it checked by the host. A right answer wins a small prize, in the past ink, paper, a brush, an inkstone, a fan, a scented sachet or fruit. Riddles draw on the classics, poetry, proverbs, or the names of animals and plants. Both entertainment and a test of wits, the game has stayed very popular.

The word itself is easy to take apart: 猜 (cāi) "to guess", 灯 (dēng) "lantern", 谜 (mí) "riddle".

In several southern languages (Min, Hakka, Cantonese), 灯 "lantern" sounds like 丁, the "son" of 添丁 "to have a baby boy": lighting a lantern that night is a wish for a birth in the family.

The dish of the festival is a round ball of glutinous rice flour, usually filled with red bean paste, sesame or peanuts, and served in a hot broth or syrup. Its round shape stands for the family together (团圆, tuányuán).

In the north it is called 元宵 (yuánxiāo), like the festival; in the south, in Taiwan and in Southeast Asia, 汤圆 (tāngyuán), literally "rounds in soup". Many people make no difference between them, but in Beijing, for example, two methods are told apart:

• yuanxiao are rolled: a firm, sweet filling is cut into small pieces, dipped in water and shaken in dry flour, layer after layer (摇元宵, "shaking yuanxiao"); machines often do the work today;

• tangyuan are shaped by hand: the filling is wrapped in a glutinous rice dough. It can be sweet or savoury, and in the south tangyuan are also eaten at the winter solstice.

Both names are old. Under the Ming, Liu Ruoyu (刘若愚) described Beijing's yuanxiao in his Zhuozhong zhi (酌中志): fine glutinous rice flour, a filling of walnuts and white sugar, a ball "rolled while sprinkled with water, as big as a walnut", and, he adds, "what Jiangnan (江南) calls tangyuan".

Lanterns remain the heart of the festival. Many cities hold large lantern shows: in the Culture Park of Chengdu, the Qinhuai lantern fair (秦淮灯会) in Nanjing, the lantern evenings in Hong Kong's parks. In Taiwan, the festival comes with the big Taiwan Lantern Festival and, in Pingxi (平溪), with sky lanterns.

Traditional parades, already described under the Ming and Qing, mix lion dances (舞狮) and dragon dances (舞龙), stilt walkers (踩高跷), "land boat" dances (旱船) and yangge dances (秧歌); lions, dragons and stilts are still very popular today, and at night fireworks go up. An old custom is to walk about and cross bridges to "drive away the hundred illnesses" (走百病): the Dijing jingwu lüe already shows the women of Beijing going out together at night "to dispel illness".

For a long time, the festival also belonged to lovers. It was one of the few nights when young women could go out to see the lanterns, and so meet young men: it earned the nickname "Chinese Valentine's Day". This is hardly the case any more in mainland China or Taiwan, where Qixi (七夕) plays that role. In Malaysia and Singapore, single people write their names and contact details on mandarin oranges and throw them into a river or lake, hoping a suitor will fish them out.

Among the festival's famous poems, two Song-dynasty ci (词) bear the same title, "元夕" (the night of the first full moon).

The first, to the tune 生查子, runs to eight lines. Last year, on the festival night, the lanterns of the flower market shone as bright as day, and two lovers had arranged to meet "after dusk, when the moon climbs to the tips of the willows". This year, the moon and the lanterns are unchanged, but the loved one is gone, and tears wet the sleeves of a spring robe.

Its author is disputed. The poem appears in the collected works of Ouyang Xiu (欧阳修), a Northern Song scholar, to whom it was long attributed. Later, Yang Shen (杨慎) gave it to the poet Zhu Shuzhen (朱淑真), of the Southern Song, whose life remains obscure; under the Qing, Wang Shizhen (王士禛) replied that it was already in Ouyang Xiu's collection, and the Chinese press was still arguing about it in the 1940s.

The second is by Xin Qiji (辛弃疾), a Southern Song poet, to the tune 青玉案. It paints a night when "the east wind makes a thousand trees blossom", so many are the lanterns and fireworks, and ends with a meeting: the one sought "a hundred, a thousand times in the crowd" was standing where the lights grow dim.