People throng the Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai to appreciate the lanterns and celebrate the Lantern Festival. The festival, which falls on today this year and coincides with the Valentine’s Day, used to be a romantic day in ancient China,a once-a-year opportunity for single young people to encounter possible sweethearts while strolling around to appreciate lanterns. [Photo: Dong Jun]

Tonight people may choose between celebrating the Lantern Festival and murmuring sweet nothings to a valentine. But in ancient China, the festival was a rare chance for young people to meet. Zhang Qian reports.

To light lanterns or romance a sweetheart — that’s the choice tonight, which is both the traditional Lantern Festival and Valentine’s Day night.

Or, to spend the evening in a carnival atmosphere under the first full moon of the new lunar year — or spend it with a special someone.

Some people may do both, concluding the 15-day Chinese lunar New Year celebration on the Lantern Festival (Yuanxiao Jie) — and appreciating lanterns hand in hand with a good friend.

Apart from candlelight dinners, chocolate and roses, people can visit colorful lantern displays, enjoy sweet tangyuan rice dumplings, and carry traditional rabbit-shaped lanterns in community parades. Rabbit lanterns symbolize the bunny that lives on the moon.

Interestingly, the Lantern Festival was also a romantic day in ancient China, a once-a-year opportunity for single young people to encounter possible sweethearts while strolling around to appreciate lanterns.

Girls were not permitted to leave their house, except during the Lantern Festival when groups of chaperoned girls could join crowds in gazing at lanterns — and keep an eye out for attractive youths, who also were eyeing them.

Traditional festivals featured lantern exhibitions, dragon dances, lion dances, “land boat” dances, stilt-walking, acrobatic performances, colorful “twisting” Yangko folk dances from northern China, and other performances.

Today most of the traditions have faded out, except for special performances, but lantern appreciation continues, as does riddle guessing.

Simple riddles are pasted on lanterns and passersby try to answer them, sometimes winning a prize.

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