Chinese New Year firecrackers: from burning bamboo to the city bans

The history can be read in a handful of books, each catching the custom at a different stage. The sections below take them one at a time.

Bamboo is a row of hollow chambers sealed off from each other at the joints. Put a green length in a fire and the air and sap inside each chamber heat with nowhere to go, until a wall gives way with a sharp report. No chemistry is needed beyond a stove and a bamboo grove, which most of southern China has always had.

The best description of how it was done comes surprisingly late, from the poet Fan Chengda, who retired to Stone Lake outside Suzhou in the 1180s and wrote ten poems on the year-end customs of the farming families around him. The fifth is the "Ballad of the Firecrackers," and it reads like a set of instructions. After the bean porridge has been eaten and the dust swept, you cut lengths of bamboo five feet long and roast them over firewood. When sap starts to sweat out at the joints and the heat has gone right through, a strong servant grabs one and runs; the children step back out of range; he smashes it on the ground at the foot of the steps, and it roars like thunder. "One bang, two bangs, and the hundred ghosts take fright; three bangs, four, and their nests fall in." At ten bangs, a hundred, the gods are at peace, and everything in the eight directions is calm.

Then the detail I like best: the family picks up the scorched ends and stacks them under the bed, where "they still have power enough to drive off sickness." Nothing in the New Year went to waste, not even the spent ammunition.

Fan's preface adds two facts. The custom was found in other prefectures too, but was strongest in Wu, the Suzhou region. And the date had moved: "in the old days it was on New Year's morning, but in Wu it is the night of the 25th" of the twelfth month, the evening after the Kitchen God is seen off. That puts real bamboo in the fire well over a century after gunpowder had a published recipe, which is a useful reminder that inventions do not sweep the countryside overnight.

The Jingchu Suishiji, Zong Lin's sixth-century record of the year in the middle Yangtze, opens its New Year with the firecrackers. On the first day of the first month, everyone rises at cock-crow, and the first thing they do is set off firecrackers in the courtyard "to drive away the Shansao and evil ghosts."

The commentary on the book explains the Shansao by quoting an older collection of marvels, the Shenyijing, and the full entry there is a treat. Deep in the western mountains, it says, lives a manlike creature a foot or so tall, naked, which catches shrimp and crabs. It is not afraid of people. When it sees travelers stop for the night, it comes to their fire after dark to roast its catch, and when nobody is looking it steals their salt to season it. Anyone who offends it comes down with chills and fever. But people had found its weakness: they put bamboo in the fire, it burst with a crack, and the Shansao fled in terror.

So the loudest custom in the Chinese year was aimed at a knee-high shellfish poacher with a talent for malaria. Our page on the Nian tells how a far grander monster, first written down in 1933, took the credit.

The Shenyijing itself needs a caution. It carries the name of Dongfang Shuo, a wit at the court of Emperor Wu of Han in the second century BC, but the editors of the eighteenth-century imperial library catalogue rejected that outright: the book is not in the Han court's own list of his writings, and the commentary credited to Zhang Hua is not in Zhang Hua's biography either. It is a later book in borrowed clothes. That makes the sixth-century Jingchu Suishiji, not the "Han" marvel book, the first text we can actually date for the New Year bang.

The same commentary records a second explanation, and a pointed one. Some people, it says, held that firecrackers and burning grass came from the great torches lit in the royal courtyard, and that ordinary households had no business copying a king's rite. Whether or not anyone listened, the households won.

Gunpowder is Chinese, and its first printed recipe is a weapon. The Wujing Zongyao, a military manual presented to the Song court in 1044, gives a formula of sulfur, saltpeter and charcoal with pitch, lacquer and oils, packed into incendiary balls. A bang for its own sake comes into the record a few generations later.

Meng Yuanlao, writing in 1147 about the Kaifeng he had lost to the Jin invasion, describes the military displays staged for the emperor. In the middle of mock fights with spears, swords and shields, "suddenly there was a sound like a thunderclap, called a baozhang," and the shield fighters withdrew into a burst of smoke, out of which came performers masked as ghosts, spitting fire. A few bangs later, a masked figure "like the image of Zhong Kui" danced in. The firecracker had become a stage cue. On New Year's Eve the same book has the palace holding its great exorcism procession, after which "that night in the palace there were firecrackers and cheering, heard outside the walls."

The real leap is in Hangzhou, the southern capital, in Zhou Mi's memoir of its last decades. At court at the end of the year, he writes, there were firecrackers made in every shape, some like fruit, some like little figures. And the palace command presented a screen painted on the outside with Zhong Kui catching ghosts, which hid a fuse inside: "light it once, and a hundred and more go off in a row without a break." That is the firecracker string, wrapped in the image of the demon queller, more than seven hundred years ago. In the city outside, households kept up firecrackers and drums all night, and the noise had its own name, "deafening the hall."

Put Zhou Mi beside Fan Chengda and the picture is clear. In the same century, the court had fused strings of gunpowder crackers and the farmers outside Suzhou were still roasting bamboo and running with it. The word stayed with the bamboo.

Three words cover the history. Baozhu, exploding bamboo, is the oldest, and it is the word in Wang Anshi's eleventh-century New Year poem that every Chinese schoolchild learns, which opens with the old year ending "amid the sound of firecrackers." Baozhang is the Song word for the gunpowder bang. And 鞭炮 bianpao, roughly "whip-crackers," is the everyday word for the long strings, which go off with the rattle of a cracking whip.

Fucha Dunchong's Annual Customs of Beijing of 1900 uses the words side by side, and shows how much of the year they filled. On New Year's Day, just after midnight, the city lights incense and sets off baozhu to receive the gods, "lane after lane, without pause." On the second day, the god of wealth gets bianpao "in great numbers, day and night without stopping." On Little New Year they are "extremely many." On the 24th of the sixth month, the birthday of Guan Yu, the god of war, "the bianpao are no fewer than at New Year." The same book lists the firework stalls of the Lantern season and the names of their wares, among them the double-kick, which bangs once on the ground and again in the air.

The color is the other half of it. B.D. Wilson, a colonial officer in Hong Kong from 1948 to 1983, describes a big shop opening ending with a long string hung from the end of a bamboo pole held at forty-five degrees and lit from the bottom, so that the explosions climbed the string one by one. Afterward the ground was covered in pieces of red paper, crackers being always red, the lucky color, and the street wreathed in smoke. The bigger and richer the opening, the longer the string had to be.

At New Year that red carpet lands on the morning of the first day, which is the one day of the year you are not supposed to sweep, in case the new luck goes out with the dust. Our page on Chinese New Year taboos has the sixth-century story behind that rule.

Once the noise meant "evil out," it soon also meant "something good is starting," and the occasions multiplied. Wilson lists them for 1950s Hong Kong: the opening of a new business, births and marriages, "any occasion that was the beginning of a new enterprise." In Beijing the god of wealth was welcomed with them on the second day; in the south he comes on the fifth, and households compete to be the first to set them off at dawn (our page on Caishen has the scramble). The lion dance works the same way, its drums and crackers doing with noise what the lion does with its glare.

Underneath it all is the idea of the very first text. A loud enough bang clears the air, and whatever comes next can start clean.

The trouble with a custom that is meant to be frightening is that it works. In the twentieth century, the cities with the densest Chinese populations started to count the eyes, hands and houses it cost, and one after another they banned it.

Hong Kong comes through the account of the officer quoted above. In the 1960s Wilson called a meeting of the fire brigade's chief officer and the medical department, and all of them pressed for a ban; the manufacture of fireworks was already illegal in the colony, and explosions at the factories across the water in Macao showed why. He expected the government to refuse, and it did, for fear that, with riots already behind it, a ban would give an excuse for more unrest. It was "several years" before it felt the public would accept one, and then it sweetened the ban with an official fireworks display over the harbor at Chinese New Year.

Singapore had a cracker war. In 1970, according to Culturepaedia, the Singaporean encyclopedia of Chinese culture, the Ming Court Hotel bought over half a million firecrackers to compete with the new Hilton, whose string hung 26 stories high. In 1972 two unarmed policemen were attacked with firecrackers, and that year the Dangerous Fireworks Act banned them for good. When firecrackers were set off in Chinatown on New Year's Eve 2004, with permits and safety precautions, 20,000 people came to hear the first ones in 32 years.

Beijing banned them in 1993, and many cities across China followed. Twelve years later, in September 2005, Beijing gave up and lifted the ban, moving to limits on where and when, though air pollution brought tighter rules again, including a 2017 plan to close everything inside the Fifth Ring Road. In December 2023 the legislative affairs commission of the National People's Congress weighed in: national law, it said, contains no blanket ban on fireworks that meet the standards, opinions on total bans are divided and they are hard to enforce, so local rules should be revised in the spirit of the higher law. The decision has gone back to each city, and every year the argument starts again in the weeks before the New Year.

Both sides of that argument are, in a way, making the same case the Jingchu Suishiji made. The noise is meant to keep harm away from the household. The question a modern city asks is only which harm is closer: the Shansao, or the firecracker.