If you’ve ever walked through a street strung with glowing, curved paper shapes on a crisp night, or watched families huddle to light small, colorful candle holders while kids race with handheld lanterns, you’ve likely stumbled on a lantern festival. But if you’re like many people who’ve only seen these moments in movies or social media reels, you might picture them as just another “Asian tradition” with no deeper meaning—like a pretty backdrop for a wedding or a holiday card. For me, as someone who’s spent 12 years making and supplying lanterns for festivals around the world, that’s the part that stings a little. I didn’t start in this business because I loved how they looked (though I do, a lot). I started because I saw how these lights, often written off as decorative, hold a story that’s as old as human desire to connect, to hope, and to say goodbye to the dark. Lantern
Let’s start with the basics: a lantern festival, at its core, is a gathering centered on illuminated, portable or fixed light structures—lanterns—used for celebration, ritual, or community reflection. But it’s not one single event. The term wraps up dozens of distinct, centuries-old holidays across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and even parts of South Asia, each with its own rules, symbols, and people. The most famous by far is China’s Lantern Festival, also called Yuanxiao Jie, which marks the final day of the Lunar New Year. It’s the day when the noisy, chaos of firecrackers and New Year visits fades into quiet, intentional light displays. The history there dates back over 2,000 years, to the Han Dynasty, when Emperor Wu of the Han ordered lanterns lit in his palace to honor Buddhist monks who came to teach about light defeating darkness. Over time, it spread to villages, and the holiday grew to include riddles on lanterns (a game where you write a riddle on a lantern’s side and people guess the answer for small prizes), tangyuan (sticky rice balls eaten together as a family), and parades with lion dancers weaving through streets lined with paper lanterns.
But China’s isn’t the only one. In Vietnam, Tết Trung Thu—often called the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival— is a much brighter, child-focused affair, held to celebrate harvest and the moon’s fullness. Families buy paper lanterns shaped like stars, animals, or even superheroes now, to give to kids, who carry them in parades while singing songs about the moon goddess, Mẫu Âu Cơ. In Thailand, the Loy Krathong festival combines lanterns with floating flower baskets, but wait—let’s clarify that: Loy Krathong has two key light elements: the floating krathongs (small rafts with candles) and the Yi Peng lanterns, which are hot-air paper lanterns launched into the night sky, meant to let go of bad luck and worries from the past year. In Japan, there’s the Toro Nagashi festival, where families float small paper lanterns on rivers to honor the spirits of ancestors, turning stretches of water into glowing paths home for the dead. Even in parts of India, during Diwali, people light clay diyas (small oil lanterns) to guide the goddess Lakshmi into their homes—though Diwali is sometimes called the Festival of Lights, it shares so much core with these other lantern festivals that it’s often lumped into the same global umbrella.
What I’ve learned over these 12 years is that every lantern festival has two non-negotiable truths. First, they hinge on light’s dual role: it’s both a practical tool (before electricity, it lit dark nights, letting people gather after long winters or harvests) and a symbolic language. When a family hangs a red lantern outside their door for the Lunar New Year, that red isn’t just a color—it’s a wish for good luck. When a Thai farmer launches a Yi Peng lantern, he’s not just launching paper and heat; he’s launching all the stress from a season of heavy rains or failed crops, hoping the sky will carry it away. When a Japanese teen watches their lantern float down the river at Toro Nagashi, they’re saying goodbye to a friend who moved away, or to a year of grief after losing a loved one. Light, in these festivals, is a messenger.
Second, lantern festivals are built for community. They’re not private, individual rituals. Even if you float a lantern alone at a river, you’re surrounded by hundreds of other people doing the exact same thing, all sharing that quiet, hopeful moment. I’ve seen that firsthand at my company—we supply lanterns to organizers in over 20 countries, from small town festivals in rural Ohio all the way to the massive lantern parades in Seoul for Chuseok. A few years back, I was on a call with a festival coordinator in a small town in Pennsylvania. He told me they wanted to host a lantern festival because their town had lost a local mine the year before, and everyone was still reeling. They bought 5,000 small paper lanterns from us, and when night fell, the streets were lined with thousands of glowing lights, and a group of former miners brought a set of traditional Chinese lanterns they’d borrowed from a local Asian community group to add to the display. By the end of the night, people were sharing tangyuan from a small stall set up by that same Asian group, and kids were trading riddles written on hand-drawn lanterns. That’s when I realized: lantern festivals don’t just carry on old traditions—they create new ones, tailored to the people who need them most.
Now, you might be wondering how a lantern is made, because if you’ve only bought a cheap plastic lantern at a drugstore, you’ve never seen a real festival lantern. The ones we supply aren’t the thin, foldable ones that break after one use. A traditional festival lantern starts with a frame, usually made of bamboo or thin metal wire—bamboo is more traditional, because it’s light, strong, and has been used for thousands of years. The frame is bent into shapes: round for Yuanxiao, star-shaped for Trung Thu, cylindrical for Chinese palace lanterns. Then we stretch rice paper or silk over the frame, and paint it with symbols: dragons for good luck, lotus flowers for purity, rabbits for the moon (for Trung Thu, that’s a big one). Inside, we put a light source—originally a candle, but now we use LED bulbs, which are safer for large displays, especially around crowds. For sky lanterns, we use fire-resistant paper and a small wax fuel cell that heats the air inside, making the lantern float. Modern lanterns also use solar-powered LEDs for outdoor displays, which cuts down on electricity costs and is better for the environment.
But here’s the thing I want to make clear: lantern festivals aren’t just about the lanterns. They’re about what people do with them. A few months ago, I went to a Loy Krathong festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I watched a grandmother teach her 7-year-old granddaughter how to decorate a krathong with jasmine and banana leaves, and the little girl dropped a lit candle into the water and watched it float away, screaming “Goodbye, bad luck!” at the top of her lungs. Later that night, we set up a display of 100 large dragon lanterns along the river, and a group of local teens started taking photos with them, then posted them on TikTok with the hashtag #LightsForHope. That’s the magic: the old traditions mix with new technology, new faces, new hopes. Lantern festivals don’t stay the same, and that’s a good thing.
I’ve also seen the mistakes people make when they don’t understand what lantern festivals are about. Too often, companies will use “lantern festival” as a theme for a corporate holiday party, with cheap plastic lanterns and no context for the meaning behind them. That’s why we work only with organizers who want to respect the traditions—whether that means sourcing authentic bamboo lanterns for a Chinese community festival, or adapting lanterns for a new community’s needs. Last year, a school in Toronto asked us to make small, paper lanterns for their Lunar New Year fair, and we worked with their Asian student club to teach the kids about the symbolism of red and gold lanterns, and even shared a few traditional riddles for them to use. That’s the kind of work that matters to me, way more than selling a thousand lanterns for a corporate event that just wants a “vibe.”
If you’re thinking about hosting a lantern festival, or even adding lanterns to an existing event, here’s what I hope you take away from this: lantern festivals are about connection—between people, between past and present, between hope and action. They don’t have to be limited to a specific culture or holiday. That small town in Pennsylvania turned a traditional Chinese festival into a community healing event, and it became one of their most beloved annual traditions. You can do the same, whether you’re organizing a small neighborhood gathering, a town-wide festival, or a corporate team-building event that feels meaningful.
When you work with a lantern supplier, you’re not just buying lights—you’re buying into that story. That’s why our team doesn’t just sell lanterns; we sit down with every organizer to talk about what they want their festival to mean. Do they want to honor ancestors? Celebrate a harvest? Help a community heal after a loss? We help them pick the right lanterns, from traditional hand-painted paper lanterns to modern solar-powered displays, and we share resources about the traditions behind each type of lantern, so your event feels authentic and respectful.
If you’re ready to talk about bringing the magic of lantern festivals to your community, we’re here to help. We can create custom designs for your event, source authentic materials, and work with your timeline to make sure your lanterns are ready in time for your big day. Whether you need a few dozen small lanterns for a neighborhood fair, or thousands of large display lanterns for a city-wide festival, we’re committed to making sure your event has the same heart and meaning that these festivals have carried for thousands of years.
Light Up Wreath References:
- Li, Xiaowei. "The Social and Cultural Significance of China’s Lantern Festival." Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 58, no. 2, 2021, pp. 145-172.
- Srisawat, Naree. "Loy Krathong and Yi Peng: Intersecting Rituals of Light in Northern Thailand." Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2019, pp. 321-348.
- Tanaka, Yuki. "Toro Nagashi: Floating Lanterns and Ancestral Memory in Modern Japan." Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2015, pp. 89-112.
- Williams, Raymond. "Global Lantern Festivals: Tradition, Adaptation, and Community in the 21st Century." Cultural Studies Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4, 2022, pp. 297-320.
Taizhou Dacheng Lighting Co., Ltd.
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