Celebrating Chinese New Year Around the World!

Celebrating Chinese New Year Around the World!

Dragon dances in Hong Kong. Parades in San Francisco. A lantern festival in Malaysia. Around the world annually, ethnic Chinese and their neighbors get into the spirit of Chinese New Year. New Zealand and Ireland even issue special postage stamps for the occasion. For centures, Chinese people have been migrating to other countries and bringing their customs with them. Additionally, China has always had lots of contact the Asian countries that neighbor it, and Chinese New Year celebrations are now the Middle Kingdom's largest cultural export.

Because of China's vast amount of contact with its neighbors through the centuries, Chinese New Year is a festival celebrated in many parts of Asia. The large numbers of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia has meant that the Chinese New Year celebrations there have grown immensely over the years, with many Mainland Chinese travelling on holidays to Malaysia during the Spring Festival period. Chinese New Year in Kuala Lumpur is a festive affair, with its own dragon dances and a bright lantern festival.

Similarly, Hong Kong and Taiwan both celebrate Chinese New Year with parades and dragon dances. Taiwan's celebrations mirror Mainland China's in a lot of ways, but unique to Taiwan is the mythical monster, Nian, who was said to greedily eat people on New Year's Eve. To keep him away, the Taiwanese put up red couplet banners across their doors.

Vietnam also has its own New Year celebration, Tet. Tet is very similar to Chinese New Year, lasting for 7 days over the lunar New Year. Like the Chinese, during Tet, Vietnamese set off firecrackers, spend time visiting their families and eat a huge feast.

Chinese emigrants have also taken Chinese New Year to the West. In San Francisco, which has one of the U.S.'s largest Chinese populations, there is an impressive Chinese New Year parade and lots of decorations. The U.K. and Ireland have also seen an increase in Chinese New Year celebrations, with a large parade in London and dragon boat races on Dublin's Liffey River.

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