Did you know that Chinese New Year is actually called Spring Festival in China and that people celebrate the old year rather than the new one?
 A Chinese lantern hanging in the school hall |
This is one of the interesting facts we discovered when we researched Chinese festivals. In China, people mark time in lunar months and the Spring Festival starts with the first lunar month, which varies between January and early February. It ends on the fifth day of the lunar month.
In the north of China, people celebrate by eating steamed dumplings, called jaozi.
In the south of the country, they eat sticky rice pudding called nimgao.
The oldest Chinese festival is the Dragon-boat Festival which occurs on the fifth day of the lunar month. It was first celebrated in 277BC.
It marks the death of a Chinese poet. When he died, his followers threw bamboo leaves and cooked rice into the water to tempt the fish away from his body. This later became the tradition of eating zongzi.
If you manage to balance an egg on its end at 12 noon on this day, it is said that you will have a lucky year.
Mandarin teacher Lilly Chen explained that festivals are an important part of Chinese tradition.
She said: "I like Spring Festival because I get together with my family. The tradition I least like is men telling women what to do."
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