A time for discovery

HOT|HAINAN

Welcoming the new year in southern warmth

A Hainanese saying goes, "The chopping board never rests on New Year's Eve."

No Spring Festival celebration in China's southernmost province is complete without chicken. After Mid-Autumn Festival, rural families start raising free-range fowl to boil for New Year's Eve dinner.

Families set out a feast, light incense and candles, and the head of the household leads the family in bowing in respect to their ancestors. In rural areas, paper money is burned, and liquor and dishes are offered before ancestral portraits in solemn ceremonies.

The provincial capital, Haikou, is a hub for Chinese New Year shopping. Markets offer everything from traditional sweets and pastries to dried goods and seafood. Commissioning streetside calligraphers to handwrite couplets customizes the celebrations.

Haikou's residents traditionally eat vegetarian meals, like hotpot, on New Year's Day. In ancient times, this was considered a commitment to nonviolence for the upcoming year. Today, it's considered a healthy start to the year.

In Wenchang city, guests bring their own firecrackers when visiting relatives. It's believed that more fireworks bring more blessings and popularity.

In central Hainan, families from the Li ethnic group enjoy Shanlan rice liquor, sing folk songs and bamboo-pole dance to celebrate the previous year's harvest until the fifth day of Chinese New Year. People of the Li ethnic group also believe that eating chicken on Chinese New Year brings good luck.

The "sealing the rice jar" ritual marks the prelude to the Li group's holiday. Around the middle of the 12th month of the traditional calendar, matriarchs choose an odd-numbered auspicious date on which to fill their rice jars after the third cockcrow after sunrise. They then cap these containers with red paper. The jars are reopened on the 15th day of the first month of the Chinese calendar, and the rice is cooked for the family.

Cured sausages, preserved meats and dried red snapper are essential dishes for Hakka families' New Year celebrations. There's a saying, "no feast is complete without fish", in Danzhou city, where families who live by the coast use fish, especially red snapper, as sacrificial offerings. A whole dried red snapper symbolizes good fortune, prosperity and abundance.

But visitors don't need fish to find abundance and fortune during their Spring Festival explorations in Hainan or beyond. From the country's southern edge to its northern tip, for many expats, such journeys are often less about returning home than discovering it. And that's something worth celebrating.