The Ritual Significance of “Light” During the Spring Festival

During the Spring Festival, a time for family reunions, it's fascinating to explore the millennia-old rituals surrounding light.

You'll discover that though our ancestors lacked knowledge of luminous intensity, color temperature, or modern optics, their simple understanding and reverence for light gave rise to a rich and meaningful tradition of festive illumination.

Light during the Spring Festival serves not merely as illumination, but as a temporal anchor, a source of psychological comfort, and a vessel for cultural expression.

The Light of Spring Festival Eve: Dispelling the Darkness of “Time”

The most quintessential light ritual of the Spring Festival is undoubtedly the “lighting lamps to illuminate the year” on New Year's Eve, also known as the “fire of watching the year pass.”

This represents the purest application of light—using bright lamps to dispel the darkness of the final night of the year.

New Year's Eve marks the pivotal moment when the old year gives way to the new, and it is also the time when the malevolent spirit known as “Nian” or “Xuhao” roams.

Since the Nian beast fears red and light, people must light candles and lamps in every room, even under beds, keeping them burning all night long—a practice called “illuminating Xuhao.”

This custom essentially uses light to establish a protective boundary, employing a continuous stream of photons to safeguard the family domain from intrusion through the cracks of time.

During the Ming Dynasty, this practice reached its peak, as people believed it would ensure abundant wealth for the coming year.

The Battle Between Light and Time: From an optical perspective, this represents a pursuit of “continuity.”

Keeping the lights burning from New Year's Eve through the first day of the new year, any interruption in the light was considered inauspicious.

This symbolized that life, like time, flows endlessly.

The family gathered in a space illuminated by candlelight or a brazier, awaiting the first dawn of the new year. The continuity of light completed the transition from the old year to the new.

Light of Blessings: Illuminating the Inner “Lantern”

If the light of staying up all night symbolizes dispelling external darkness, then the widespread custom of “lighting lamps” during the Spring Festival is more about illuminating the heart and praying for the future.

Temple “Brightness Lamps” and “Peace Lamps”: Lighting lamps at temples is an extremely important folk custom during the Spring Festival.

Whether it's Fo Guang Shan's month-long “Peace Lamp Ceremony” or devotees offering “light lamps” before Buddha, their core meaning remains: “A thousand years of darkness can be illuminated by a single lamp.”

In Buddhist culture, lamps symbolize wisdom and light. Lighting a lamp not only illuminates the Buddha's presence but also kindles one's own “inner lamp,” praying to dispel inner ignorance and afflictions, bringing wisdom, peace, and hope for the new year.

The Offering of Lamps: This tradition traces back to the reign of Emperor Ming of Han (during the Yongping era), who promoted Buddhism and decreed lantern displays during the Lantern Festival. It gradually spread from the imperial court to the common people.

A single lamp becomes the medium connecting mortals with divine power.

Parents light lamps for their children, praying for intelligence and obedience; children light lamps for their parents, praying for good health. Here, light carries specific, personified wishes.

The Light of Spectacle: Masterful Craftsmanship and Revelry in Artificial Illumination

With advancements in optical technology and craftsmanship, lanterns during the Spring Festival have evolved beyond being mere static, functional light sources. They have transformed into highly ornamental works of art and collective spectacles of light and shadow.

The Art of Lanterns: A Perfect Fusion of Optics and Materials.

The lanterns of the Spring Festival, especially the lantern festivals lasting from New Year's Eve to the Lantern Festival, represent the ancient people's masterful integration of optical properties and material craftsmanship.

Take Zhejiang's “Xianju Needle-Pierced Bone-Free Lanterns” as an example. This craft, hailed as “China's Premier Lantern,” features lantern bodies constructed entirely from interlocking cardboard panels without any internal framework.

Even more astonishing is that its translucent patterns are not painted but meticulously pierced by artisans using embroidery needles (approximately 0.3 millimeters in diameter), stitch by stitch, onto the paper.

It is said that approximately 100 pinholes must be punched per square centimeter. For a single lamp, the number of pinholes ranges from over a hundred thousand to over a million.

When the internal light source illuminates, these densely packed, orderly arrayed micro-pinhole perforations function like countless meticulously designed point light source arrays or micro-pore diffraction units.

Light passing through these apertures is no longer a straightforward illumination but is instead diffracted and softened, creating a hazy, refined, starlike play of light and shadow.

This “pixelation” of light represents the ancient artisans' unconscious application of scattering and diffraction principles, yielding an exceptionally soft and layered visual experience.

Similarly, Haining's “Xiaoshi Lantern Festival” emphasizes the interplay between intricate needlework and luminous effects, using light transmission to imbue calligraphy, paintings, and seal carvings with a unique vitality after dark.

Firecrackers and fireworks: pulsing light and explosive artistry.

The light of the Spring Festival appears in its most intense and fleeting form—fireworks and firecrackers.

From the crackling light of burning bamboo sections in the earliest “firecrackers” to the later invention of gunpowder, humanity created an “artificial light” capable of erupting with blinding intensity across the night sky.

This is not merely a visual feast, but a high-intensity pulsed light source—a thunderous symbol of exorcising evil spirits and ushering in the new year with monumental vigor.

At midnight, as fireworks erupt simultaneously across the nation, the entire Chinese land is instantly illuminated by countless points of light. This spectacle itself is a magnificent optical phenomenon.