Chinese New Year
Next: February 6, 2027
The year turns with the new moon.
The story
Where it comes from
Chinese New Year, the Spring Festival (春节), begins on the first new moon of the lunisolar calendar, between 21 January and 20 February. It is at least three thousand years old, rooted in end-of-winter sacrifices to ancestors and gods recorded in the Shang and Zhou dynasties. The legend most often told is of Nian (年), a beast driven off with red, fire and noise, which is the story behind the colour, the firecrackers and the lanterns. The festival is also the new year for Vietnam (Tết), Korea (Seollal) and the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia.
How it's celebrated
The reunion dinner on New Year's Eve is the centre of it: families travel home for the largest annual human migration on earth. Houses are cleaned before the day (never on it, or you sweep the luck out), doors are dressed with red couplets, children and unmarried adults receive red packets (红包 hóngbāo; angpow in Malaysia and Singapore), and the fifteen days that follow have their own customs: visiting in-laws on the second day, welcoming the God of Wealth on the fifth, tossing yee sang in Malaysia and Singapore, and the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth. Lion and dragon dances, mandarin oranges and new clothes complete it.
Did you know
- The festival is a public holiday in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Mauritius and Suriname.
- Each year is one of twelve animals: 2026 is the Year of the Horse, 2027 the Goat, 2028 the Monkey.
- Fish (鱼 yú) is served because it sounds like 'surplus' (余); the dish is often deliberately left unfinished so the surplus carries into the new year.
- Chinese New Year sees the largest yearly movement of people in the world: several billion passenger journeys over the forty-day chunyun travel season.
The greeting
新年快乐 · 恭喜发财 · Gong Xi Fa Cai!
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