Baihe Town in Qingpu District stages a series of traditional folk and intangible cultural heritage activities to celebrate the Lantern Festival, blending local culture, rural vitality and festive traditions.
Residents and tourists gathered to enjoy a folk custom feast blending ancient charm and modern creativity, celebrating a joyful Lantern Festival.
The celebration highlighted the town's time-honored Lantern Festival customs and explored the cultural connotation of Lantern Festival tradition.
Blessings and inheritance lie at the heart of the festival. Baihe's Lantern Festival features age-old traditions of lantern hanging and bridge-walking, accompanied by traditional Chinese opera and Jiangnan sizhu (string and wind music) music.
A feast of Lantern Festival is part of the celebration.
The opening ceremony began with a traditional lion dance eye-dotting ritual. The venue was decorated with lanterns and filled with melodious music, leading visitors into a Jiangnan folk custom feast and reviving old memories of Baihe Lantern Festivals.
Performances included Jiangnan sizhu music, erhu (a Chinese two-stringed fiddle), saxophone, local opera and a medley of folk acts.
The highlight "Walking Three Bridges" ritual was staged. Led by auspicious "lions" and accompanied by sizhu music, participants walked with lanterns across Maxiang Bridge, Dongzhou Bridge and Wangxiang Bridge. Along the route, activities including touhu (an ancient arrow-throwing game), cuju (ancient football), and chuiwan (an ancient Chinese game similar to golf) enriched the festive fun. There were also a traditional costume show and ancient poems about Qinglong Town.
The sound of music and laughter filled the air. For hundreds of years, this beloved tradition has represented folk custom and family reunion among Baihe people.
A girl tries blowing sugar figures.
In the fields, people joined the grand Dajiahuo ritual. Inheritors chanted traditional songs with torches, praying for a safe, disaster-free year and a bumper harvest. The bonfire and folk songs enriched the festive warmth of the Lantern Festival.
For Baihe people, the taste of Lantern Festival always begins with a bowl of steaming porridge, a local custom passed down for 300 to 400 years. For generations, the fragrance of porridge has filled kitchens on the 15th day of the first lunar month – more than food, it embodies family reunion, neighborhood affection and nostalgia.
The two-day event features a rich lineup of activities such old alley games, strawberry-themed delicacy fair and village evening gala, reviving childhood memory.
The bazaar draws children.
Visitors are treated with intangible cultural heritage foods including porridge and rice cakes, as well as creative strawberry-themed delicacies like strawberry glutinous rice balls, strawberry eight-treasure rice and strawberry Dingsheng cakes.
People played traditional longtang (alleyway) games like marbles, diabolo, spinning tops, rubber band skipping and others.
As a historic cultural town with thousand-year heritage, Baihe boasts legacy of the Qinglong Town and preserves cultural treasures such as Baihe huju and Jiangnan sizhu.
