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Chinese New Year

Totoro and No-Face red envelopes are here to help celebrate Lunar New Year in Ghibli style【Pics】

Anime icons from Hayao Miyazaki films sure to be welcome at any Lunar New Year’s party.

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Nagasaki Lantern Festival is like Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away in real life

Local resident reveals the secret spots you won’t want to miss during this breathtaking festival. 

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Tokyo Tower lights up with hope in first-ever event celebrating Chinese New Year

It’s the first time in the tower’s history for such an event to happen.

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Starbucks Year of the Ox collections bring Chinese zodiac style to China, Taiwan, Thailand【Pics】

From playfully cute to quietly elegant, these beautiful bovines are here to keep you company on your coffee break.

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Costume-less Chinese lion dance videos show real humans, real behind-the-scenes magic【Video】

Effortlessly twirling and leaping, these acrobats are amazing… even outside of their costumes!

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Starbucks Korea’s Year of the Dog puppy cupcakes look adorable, get stabbed in the face【Videos】

Videos show lunar New Year treats require a forceful stabbing that breaks hearts while making mouths water.

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Video shows the truth behind one Chinese woman tricking parents with rental boyfriend【Video】

When mom won’t quit with the marriage nagging, desperate action must be taken.

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China’s extreme cold weather leaves buildings covered in ice both inside and out

A seriously cold snap in China leaves one residential community looking like it came straight out of Disney’s Frozen.

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More than 600,000 rounds of fireworks are exploded for this ancient Chinese New Year celebration

Every year, the Chinese New Year is celebrated for more than two weeks in January or February, with many festivals and celebrations commemorating the occasion. On the first day of the New Year, the festival kicks off with the Firecracker Ceremony, during which locals light nearly 600,000 rounds of fireworks.

Last Thursday, we headed down to New York City’s Chinatown to see the community’s 16th annual Firecracker Ceremony. The community was celebrating the beginning of the Year of the Goat.

It is a tradition for Chinese people to light bamboo sticks filled with gunpowder on the first day of the year to create as large as commotion as possible. The practice is thought to ward off evil spirits. In more recent years, the tradition is carried on with firecrackers and fireworks. Thousands of firecrackers are strung up with red ribbon on the rope in the background.

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Chinese comedians pitch brilliant boyfriend-rental service to fend off nagging parents 【Video】

The Lunar New Year is China’s biggest holiday and the time when most of the country travels back home in impressive numbers, prays for luck and of course spends some quality time with family who remind their adult children why they’re failing at life. And the Spring Festival, as it’s commonly called, can be an exceptionally annoying time for single 20- and 30-somethings whose more traditional parents gripe constantly about the lack of a significant other and the every-decreasing hope of a grandchild. A Chinese comedy group put out a video recently that offers single woman a solution to this headache—a company that rents out boyfriends to impress your parents and get them off your case until the next New Year holiday.

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A temple in China reportedly charged $19,470 to light the first incense stick for the new year

January 31st marked the Lunar New Year, and this is a time when many flock to temples and light incense and pray for the new year.

China News, cited by Chinascope, reported that a temple in Zhejiang Province used this opportunity to jack up prices for the chance to light the first incense. The temple reportedly charged $19,470 to light the first incense.

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What’s worse than overcrowded trains? Overcrowded trains filled with garbage

As many of you may know, the past week was the absolute busiest time to travel in China. With the New Year’s holiday coming up, many people who work in the big cities make the several hour, and in some cases several day, journey back home to be with family. With all those people trying to move around the country at roughly the same time, things are going to get a little cozy. Making matters worse, many passengers seem to have missed the trash receptacles, instead choosing to throw their garbage into the aisle.

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Say hello to Chunyun, the chaotic mass migration that happens every Chinese New Year

Remember that old schoolyard fable warning that, if all the people in China – for some reason simultaneously going mad and deciding to destroy both themselves and the entire planet – were to jump up and down at the exact same moment, the earth would be thrown out of its orbit? Well, apologies to anyone who has been monitoring the situation since they heard this doomsday prophecy, but it’s total nonsense. If you were to map the movement of the population of China over the coming week, however, you would indeed see something that really is quite spectacular.

Known as Chunyun, the weeks immediately before and after Chinese New year (which falls on January 31 this year) are recognised as the period during which the world’s largest human migration occurs. An estimated 3.6 billion trips will be made across various parts of China in the coming weeks as families return to their homes to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. And that means a lot of traffic jams, very cramped train journeys, and a people sleeping wherever they may lay their head.

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Rental Boyfriends a Big Hit During Chinese New Year

The most dreadful day of the year for single guys and girls is approaching in a few weeks. No, it’s not the Valentine’s Day. In China, there is a day that can be a hundred times worse than the Valentine’s Day: the Lunar New Year.

On New Year’s day (which falls on 10 February this year), families gather, feast and catch up with one another, and young men and women working in the cities take a break and return to their hometowns to pay their respects to the elders. During this once-in-a-year family gathering, there is one inevitable question that always comes up and that young adults cannot hope to avoid being asked by their relatives: “So… when are you getting married?” For those who are already attached, this may be a good conversation starter or nice way to segue into the topic of their new significant other. But for the singles – especially the ladies – being asked the same old question each year is just a never-ending nightmare.

Enter the rental boyfriend.

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