Riddles, Rice Balls, and the Close of New Year

As the fifteenth and final day of the New Year season, the Lantern Festival marks the point at which the extended holiday's restrictions and observances end and ordinary life resumes. Streets and homes are strung with lanterns of every size, many bearing riddles written on strips of paper pasted to their sides, and solving a lantern riddle correctly is treated as a small mark of cleverness rather than a formal contest with any prize beyond the pleasure of guessing right. Dragon and lion dance troupes perform through the streets, drawing on the same performance tradition used at New Year itself.

The festival's characteristic food, tangyuan, are balls of glutinous rice flour, usually filled with a sweet paste and served in a warm syrup or broth. Their round shape and their name, which puns on the word for reunion, tuanyuan, make them a deliberate edible symbol of family wholeness at the close of the New Year period, echoing the same symbolism carried by the round mooncakes of the Mid-Autumn Festival later in the year. Public displays now often add large sculptural lantern installations built around a folk theme or the animal of the coming lunar year, a modern elaboration of the older household custom of hanging a single lit lantern at the door, and cities across China, Taiwan and diaspora communities elsewhere hold organized lantern viewings that draw large crowds on the night itself.