The Lantern Festival: the night the city stayed out

Always the fifteenth of the first month on the Chinese calendar, and therefore always fourteen days after Chinese New Year, on a full moon. The lunar month runs new moon to new moon, so twelve of them fall short of the solar year and a whole extra month is added every two or three years to catch up; the festival keeps its lunar address and the Gregorian date swings by nearly a month around it. These dates are computed from the same engine that runs our calendar converter, and they run backward too, because the date of a past lantern night gets looked up as often as next year's.

Start with what is missing. The oldest surviving calendar of Chinese customs, the Jingchu Suishiji of the sixth century, has an entry for the fifteenth of the first month, and there is not a lantern in it. On that day, it says, people cook a gruel of beans, pour oil on top and offer it at the door. That night they "invite the Purple Maiden," a household spirit who lived in the latrine, to tell them how the silkworms will do this year and to answer any other question they have. The commentary adds the charm people said over the gruel: "come or don't come, wait till my three silkworms are grown." The fifteenth was a farming date, about mulberry and moths, and the moon was simply the moon.

The Daoist name for the day is older than the party too. In the Lingbao scriptures of the fifth century the year has three "primordial" dates, the fifteenths of the first, seventh and tenth months, on which the Officials of Heaven, Earth and Water audit the ledgers of everyone living and dead. The first belongs to the Heavenly Official, and the Heavenly Official's job, in the formula every later text repeats, is to bestow blessings; the middle date, when the Earth Official pardons sins, is the Hungry Ghost Festival. So the fifteenth is Shangyuan, "the upper primordial," and the god whose picture hangs in a great many Chinese shops with the words "the Heavenly Official bestows blessings" is the god of this night. Lanterns came later, and from the street.

The first person to describe the Lantern Festival as we would recognize it was trying to abolish it. Liu Yu was a censor under the first Sui emperor, in the 590s, and the Suishu preserves his memorial. In the capital and the provinces alike, he writes, "every year on the full-moon night of the first month the streets are crammed and the lanes blocked with people gathered to play. Drums deafen the sky, torches light the ground, people wear animal masks and men dress as women"; there are acrobats and entertainers "of strange shapes and forms," high stages straddling the roads, awnings up to the clouds, fine clothes and heavy make-up, carriages jammed, wine and music, families "spending everything they have on this one night." Rich and poor, men and women, monks and laymen all mixed together, out of which, he says, come lewdness and theft. He asks for an empire-wide ban, with violators charged under the statute for defying an edict. "The emperor approved."

It did not take. Sixteen years later, in 606, that emperor's son was staging the same night himself, and the Suishu's treatise on music describes it with the awe of an eyewitness. Every year in the first month, when envoys from "the ten thousand countries" came to court, they were kept in the capital until the fifteenth, when a fairground eight li long, the better part of three miles, was laid out between the Duan Gate and the Jianguo Gate. Officials built viewing stands along both sides and watched "from dusk to dawn," and the performers, mostly dressed as women in embroidered silk with jingling pendants and flowers in their hair, numbered "close to thirty thousand." Two capitals' worth of brocade went into the costumes and the imperial stores ran empty. From then on, the treatise says, it was held every year. The festival Liu Yu wanted stamped out had become a state occasion within a generation, under the same dynasty, and it never went back.

Chinese cities had curfews. The drums beat at dusk, the ward gates shut, and anyone on the main streets after that answered to the night watch. The Lantern Festival was the exception, and the Tang made the exception official: for the nights around the fifteenth the watch was told not to enforce, and the phrase for it, "the guards do not forbid the night," is the second-to-last line of the poem every Chinese reader associates with the festival. Su Weidao wrote it around 700, and its opening image, "fire trees and silver flowers," meaning the lit lanterns in the trees, is still the stock phrase for a city lit up at night.

The scale is on record. In the first month of 713, according to a Tang notebook, the court had a lantern wheel built outside the Anfu Gate of the capital, "two hundred feet high, dressed in brocade, ornamented with gold and jade, burning fifty thousand lamps, clustered like a flowering tree." A thousand palace women in silk and jewels, and a thousand more young women chosen from the two counties of the capital, "danced beneath the lantern wheel for three days and nights, a pitch of joy never seen before." By 738 the Tang administrative code listed the fifteenth of the first month among the statutory days off, one day's leave for every official, in the same sentence as the fifth of the fifth and the ninth of the ninth. The party had a legal basis.

The Song made it an engineering project. Meng Yuanlao's memoir of Kaifeng in the 1140s says that the city government began building the "lantern mountain" in front of the Xuande Gate, the palace's main gate, right after the winter solstice, and that performers were already working the crowds in the imperial avenue while it went up. By the seventh of the month it was lit: painted with scenes of the immortals, flanked by figures of the bodhisattvas Manjusri and Samantabhadra on their lion and elephant with water spouting from their fingers, a windlass hauling water to the summit to fall as an artificial waterfall, and on either side two dragons made of straw draped in blue cloth, "with tens of thousands of lamps set close along the straw, so that from a distance they seemed to be two dragons in flight." The emperor watched from the gate tower behind a yellow curtain, and the crowd below was led in cheers.

Hangzhou, a century and a half later, is where the riddles turn up. Zhou Mi's Wulin Jiushi, a memoir of the Southern Song capital written after its fall, catalogs the lanterns of the night: boneless lanterns cast around a bag of millet, lanterns of pearls strung into nets, lanterns of carved sheepskin worked like shadow puppets, a "ten-thousand-eyed gauze" lantern pricked with pinholes. And then: "there were also silk lanterns on which verses were written, often satirical, or figures painted, with hidden-head riddles and old-capital slang, to tease the passers-by." That is the first record of the lantern riddle, and it is already the modern one: a line of verse on the lantern, an answer to guess, and a crowd stopped in the street arguing about it. Zhou Mi's list of festival foods in the same entry begins with "sweet rice balls in syrup," and there is the bowl.

The food and the festival share a name in the north, where the sweet rice balls are simply called yuanxiao, "first night," after the evening they are eaten. In the south they are tangyuan, "soup rounds," and the two words name two different ways of making the same thing. A eunuch of the Ming palace, Liu Ruoyu, wrote down the court's version in the 1640s: from the ninth of the month the lantern market opened, and people "eat yuanxiao, made with fine glutinous rice flour and a filling of walnut and white sugar, sprinkled with water and rolled until walnut-sized, which is what the south calls tangyuan." Rolled, not wrapped: the filling is wetted and tossed in dry flour until it grows a coat, layer by layer, like a snowball. The southern method wraps a soft dough around the filling by hand and rolls it smooth. Northern yuanxiao are a little rough and chewy; southern tangyuan are smooth and slippery; both are served in the water they were boiled in, sweet, and both are round, because the moon is, and because the word for a family gathered is the word for round.

Liu Ruoyu's note also settles the end of the holiday. "The fifteenth is called Shangyuan, or Yuanxiao," he writes, and "the lantern market is at its height on the sixteenth." Nobody stopped at midnight. The New Year ends when the lanterns come down, and in the Ming palace that was the day after the festival, with the year's best food still on the table: winter bamboo shoots, silverfish, pigeon eggs, oranges from Zhangzhou, the first fresh shrimp.

Put the pieces together and you have the one night of the year when a respectable young woman could be in the street after dark, in a crowd, in her best clothes, with the guards looking the other way. The love poems follow. The most quoted is a short song, usually printed under Ouyang Xiu's name and sometimes under the poet Zhu Shuzhen's, that runs, in plain sense: last year on lantern night the flower market was bright as day; the moon rose over the willow tops, and we met after dusk. This year on lantern night the moon and the lanterns are as they were; I do not see last year's person, and my spring sleeves are wet. A century later Xin Qiji set the most famous search in Chinese poetry on the same night, a man looking for a woman through a thousand faces in a lantern crowd and finding her, at last, where the lights are thin.

That is why, when the site's festival hub calls this rather than Qixi the real lovers' night of the Chinese calendar, it is only reporting the poems. Qixi got the title of Chinese Valentine's Day in the 1990s, for reasons its page sets out; the fifteenth of the first month had the curfew, the crowd and the moon for a thousand years before that, and needed no label.