The painting Colored Lanterns in the Lantern Festival in the Ming Dynasty shows the happy atmosphere of the festival.

On the lunar calendar, the first month of the year is called yuan. In mandarin, night can be called xiao. The Lantern Festival is a combination of these two words, thus it is called the Yuanxiao Festival.

The fifteenth day of the first lunar month is the first day of the full moon on the lunar calendar. This night marks the beginning of a new year and the end of the Spring Festival holidays, so people get together to celebrate it. The streets and lanes are decorated with various lanterns and colored streamers, and people eat glutinous rice balls, look at beautiful lanterns and solve lantern riddles.

The Lantern Festival is a joyous carnival and many ancient Chinese paintings are themed around this traditional festival.

Viewing lanterns
During the reign of Emperor Mingdi in the Han Dynasty, the emperor gave orders to light lanterns at the palace and temples on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month in order to honor Buddhist tradition. Since then, this tradition has spread from the court to the public. Both the nobility and ordinary people hung lanterns in their houses and entire streets were brilliantly illuminated. There were many activities revolving around viewing myriad types of lanterns in the Song Dynasty. These activities lasted for five days. Even the tradition of guessing lantern riddles originated at that time and was popularized among ordinary people. People enjoyed the festival atmosphere while viewing the exquisite lanterns with various shapes of dragons, phoenixes, fish, rabbits, and rich themes on historical figures and fairy tales. The Painting of Viewing Lanterns by Li Song, a royal painter in the Southern Song Dynasty, depicted the exquisite shapes of festive lanterns at that time. In the painting, a boy carries a rabbit lantern and the other boy lifts a melon-shaped lantern, and a revolving lantern is put on a desk beside them.

Club fire performance
Shehuo refers to a series of festive activities, including walking on stilts, performing the “land boat dance,” yangko dance, lion dance and dragon dance on the street during the Lantern Festival. It is also called the “dancing team,” which is an ancient street performance art. Zhu Yu, a royal painter in the late Southern Song Dynasty, drew The Painting of a Lantern Performance describing the performance of a dancing team in Hangzhou on the Lantern Festival in the Southern Song Dynasty. In the painting, 13 artists dress up in different costumes to dance with drumbeats in exaggerated motions evocative of puppet shows and Chinese operas.