[Hai Streets] The 30-Year Evolution of Yuyuan's Lantern Festival

Hai Streets is our semi-regular column on Shanghai's great commercial arteries. From Nanjing Road East's blend of heritage storefronts and pop-culture malls to Huaihai Road's luxe lanes and Hongqiao area's international cultural diversity hubs, we explore how Shanghai's commercial hubs drive billions in sales and shape the city's identity – where commerce, culture and history collide in neon, nostalgia and non-stop foot traffic.

Of all the photo ops a UK Prime Minister could stage in Shanghai, Keir Starmer chose… pastry. Butterfly pastry, to be precise... box in hand, smile locked, snapped mid-purchase at Lu Bolang in Yuyuan Mall. No handshakes, no trade summits, just carbs and charm in the heart of Old Town. A cheerful choice to be sure.

Just a few steps past the pastries, Starmer found himself face to face with a herd of glowing horses mid-sprint – the show-stopping lantern installation titled "Six Steeds in Full Gallop, Blossoms Born of Wonder" (yes, really). Massive, luminous, and galloping straight into metaphor, it was the centerpiece flex of this year's zodiac: the Horse.

The PM lingered. Someone from his team leaned in with a soft cultural download: "In Chinese tradition, the horse is all about luck, drive, and leading the pack." Cue the polite diplomatic nodding, cameras clicking, and at least one internal monologue wondering if he was now cosmically blessed to win a by-election.

Just when he thought it was all dumplings and diplomacy, Starmer got gifted a custom lantern – not the kind you hang on your porch, but a full-blown illuminated art piece courtesy of the students at Donghua University.

Handcrafted and glowing with international sentiment, the lantern mashed up the UK's greatest hits – red double-decker, Battersea Power Station, that very cinematic viaduct from Harry Potter land, and the surreal geometry of Giant's Causeway – all strung together with a luminous ribbon symbolizing the Huangpu and the Thames in one glowing metaphor of cross-cultural flow.

It was basically "A Tale of Two Rivers" told in LEDs and heartfelt student effort. And yes, Starmer loved it.

Like clockwork (and firecracker), Shanghai's annual migration toward the glowing belly of Yuyuan kicks off every Spring Festival. The Yuyuan Lantern Festival is less an event and more a seasonal phenomenon ... one of those rare things that makes the city collectively pause, look up, and say, "Whoa."

The 2026 edition officially flipped the switch on January 26 and will keep shining through March 3, that's 36 straight nights of technicolor folklore, with one night off for Lunar New Year's Eve (Feb 16), presumably to let everyone catch their breath and unstick rice cake from their teeth.

Ticket Information

Timed entry with tickets required

Peak days:

• Fridays to Sundays
  
• February 17 to February 23(Lunar New Year's Day through the seventh day of the lunar calendar)
  
• March 3 (The Lantern Festival)
  
• Entry time: 2pm-10pm
  

Regular days:

• Entry time: 4pm-10pm
  

Ticket prices:

• Adult ticket: 80 yuan (US$11.5)
  
• Children, military personnel, and seniors: 50 yuan
  

Getting There

1. Metro

• The metro is by far the most convenient way to reach the festival.
  
• Take Metro Line 10 or Line 14 and get off at Yuyuan Garden Station.
  
• Exit via Exit 1 or Exit 7 for easy access to Yuyuan Mall.
  

2. Bus

Several bus routes serve the surrounding area.

• Routes 24, 64, and 715 stop at Fuxing East Road – Guangqi Road Station
  
• Routes 66, 306, 929, and 980 stop at Henan South – Fuxing East Road Station
  
• Routes 11, 736, 926, and 930 stop at Xiaodongmen Station
  

3. Driving

• Visitors driving to the festival may use nearby paid public parking facilities.
  
• This year, festival tickets also include parking benefits: with a valid ticket, visitors can enjoy four hours of free parking at BFC (Bund Financial Center).
  
• With more than 1,500 parking spaces and four entrances (Renmin Rd, Fengjing Rd, Dongmen Rd, and Zhonghua Rd), parking is spacious and convenient.
  
• Present your Yuyuan Lantern Festival ticket stub to redeem the free parking.
  

This year's Yuyuan Lantern Festival didn't just glow up... it BLEW out the walls entirely.

What used to be a tightly packed, selfie-thirsty light show inside Yuyuan Mall has now spilled across six full-blown lantern zones, stretching from the old-school charm of Fangbang Rd M. to the riverside gloss of the Bund. The glow now covers the entire Grand Yu Garden area like a warm neon blanket, or maybe like a mythical creature with six heads and zero chill.

Translation? You're going to need more walking shoes and fewer expectations of finding a quiet corner.

The main event is still the classic ticketed lantern show inside Yuyuan Mall. That's the beating heart of it all.

The lanterns lean on old-world craftsmanship. Bamboo bones, silk skin, hand-painted scenes from myth and memory. But now they glow with sensors, mapped light, and quiet little flexes of digital wizardry. It's folklore with a power source. A heritage rave, minus the bass.

The big theme this year is motion. Horses running. People chasing dreams. Life is a long, chaotic wilderness trail or something like that. It's a lot to hang on a lantern, but the lights lean into it.

Right outside the main display, Jiujiaochang Road turns into a solid street market. Lanterns overhead, dumplings below, a lot of people trying to carry both. You can snack, shop, take pictures of zodiac animals you don't believe in, and leave with a tote bag that says Shanghai in six fonts.

Now we're out of the ticketed core and into the open range. Five lantern zones, free to roam. BFC is the loudest.

For the first time, the Bund Financial Center is dressing up as a Spring Festival catwalk. It's shiny. It's branded. It's full of Pop Mart characters in Year of the Horse drip. Gold accents everywhere. You've got Labubu posing like he just got off the train from Tokyo Fashion Week.

It's a collab garden party, basically. Lanterns, influencers, and designer toys lit from underneath.

Right in the middle of BFC, there's a carousel made of Pop Mart characters and palace lantern styling. It spins. It glows. It reflects off the skyline like a toy store caught in a fever dream.

This is the festival's big arc in lights – from the old wood-and-silk vibe of Yuyuan to the brushed steel of the Bund. The theme is "Coming Home for the New Year," but it plays more like a visual mixtape. Some nostalgia. Some flex. Some moments that feel less like home and more like a brand activation in space. Still, it's a ride.

Twelve of Pop Mart's usual suspects – Labubu, Molly, Skullpanda, the whole crew – take turns spinning under festival lights. They've got that storybook-on-acid charm, framed neatly by the Bund's glass and neon skyline.

People stop. People pose. People post. The carousel doesn't go anywhere, but the photos do.

The lights at BFC don't stop at the plaza. They spill off the terraces and into the streets, draping trees in soft gold. It's subtle, but enough to turn the sidewalks into something that feels designed – like someone decided the Bund needed its own private constellation.

Just enough glow to make people slow down and look up.

On the BFC terrace, the "Xingmeng Welcome Spring" installation shines warmly, bringing Pop Mart's Twinkle Twinkle IP to life, while the fifth-floor riverside terrace hosts the exhibition "From 100,000 Horsepower to 72 Transformations."

The exhibition features the work "Zouma Lantern (a traditional rotating lantern): 72 Magical Transformations in a Mirror World," inspired by Sun Wukong from Havoc in Heaven. Through the interplay of mirrored surfaces and Zouma lantern imagery, it brings endless transformations to life, reimagining classic mythology through contemporary artistic innovation.

The remaining four lantern zones are also open free of charge:

1. Fuyou Road Lantern Zone
   
2. Fangbang Middle Road Lantern Zone
   
3. Gucheng Park Lantern Zone
   
4. Bund Lantern Zone
   

A Legacy of Light

People come for the lights, but most don't ask where they came from.

The Yuyuan Lantern Festival isn't new. It didn't start with social media or zodiac merch. This thing has roots deep in the city. Lantern culture in Shanghai goes back to the Han dynasty. Yuyuan's version is the oldest in town. Also the loudest. Also the one your grandparents probably snuck off to when they were young.

It's been the main event for a long time. Still is.

Back in 1994, Yuyuan got a facelift. Seven new buildings went up in full Ming and Qing drag, along with a spread of throwback market lanes. The whole thing was built to blend, and mostly it worked. Looked old, felt new, sold snacks.

By 1995, it was official – one of the top landmarks of the decade. A title that sounds made up, but hey, they printed it.

The whole scene around Chenghuang Temple has been packed since the late Qing Dynasty. That's when "going to the temple" became less about prayers and more about snacks, lanterns, and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. For a lot of Shanghainese, that ritual never left.

An old magazine from 1875 put it like this: "Pavilions near and far glowed with lights brighter than the stars. Firecrackers rang out in endless strings as people competed to outshine each other."

Then came the 1930s. The lights dimmed. The crowds thinned. The festival started to fade.

The comeback started in 1979. The lanterns were basic, the setup was thin, but people showed up. Over 50,000 in one night, according to whoever was counting.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the festival came and went. Some years it ran, some years it didn't. No one was calling it a tradition yet – not officially.

The modern era kicked off in 1995. That year, Yuyuan went all in with its first proper lantern festival.

The centerpiece was a giant glowing pig. No metaphors, no explanation. Just a massive zodiac animal parked in the middle of the mall, drawing crowds from across the city. It worked. Since then, Yuyuan and lanterns have been locked in for life.

By 2011, the festival had a new title: national intangible cultural heritage. The kind of phrase that sounds like a museum plaque, but basically means it's official now.

The craft behind it hasn't changed much. Bamboo skeletons, silk skin, tied and painted by hand. Old stories turned into light. It's labor-heavy work with roots way deeper than the merch tables outside.

Since 1995, the lantern festival's been a yearly thing. Back then, it ran from the first to the fifteenth day of the lunar new year, right on schedule with the Spring Festival calendar.

These days, it stretches. Opens earlier, closes later. In 2021, it ran from late January to March. Lantern season keeps getting longer. No one seems to mind.

The first one in 1995 ran for 11 days. Just Huabao Tower is lit up, with a giant pig stealing the show. That was enough. The crowds came. The festival stuck.

Since then, it's been one zodiac animal per year, each one getting its own light show upgrade. Tech keeps changing, but the formula holds. Packed streets, loud bridge, soft glow bouncing off steamed bun stalls. For a few weeks, it really does feel like the whole place is lit from the inside.

2023 was a shift. That's when the festival leaned hard into the Shanhai Qi Yu series – a full plunge into the Classic of Mountains and Seas playbook. Out came the beasts, spirits, and glowing mutant plants.

They mixed traditional lantern work with projection, AR, and just enough digital haze to make it all feel ancient and slightly off. Myth, rendered in pixels. Old stories given a new face, and a new light source.

2024 brought out the dragon. This time wrapped in coral, swimming through jellyfish and zodiac metaphors. Lantern design went full underwater fantasy.

That was also the year the festival packed its bags. To mark 60 years of China–France relations, Yuyuan took the show to Paris. First time out of the country. Same lanterns, different crowd. New stage, same glow.

They brought over 60 big lantern pieces, more than 2,000 lights, and set it all up in Jardin d'Acclimatation. Tickets ran €18 a head.

Before it opened, most locals figured it'd be paper lanterns tied to tree branches. Nice, polite, nothing major. The park had never hosted anything like it.

Then the lights flipped on, and the lines started forming. Half an hour wait. Two blocks long. Nobody expected that.

At its busiest, the Paris show pulled in 4,000 people an hour!! They had to bring in crowd control. The park director said he hadn't seen foot traffic like that in years.

Word spread. Officials from nearby cities started asking how to get a piece of it.

For a lot of French visitors, this was a reset. China used to mean pandas and the occasional dragon. Now it meant glowing beasts, floating rivers, and a whole visual language they hadn't seen before.

Each lantern came with a QR code. Scan it, learn the backstory. People did. A lot. Mascots sold out fast.

The codes were meant to do more than explain things. In Shanghai, they triggered glasses-free 3D effects – mythical creatures floating in midair, AR photo ops, the whole bit.

In Paris, the park's Wi-Fi couldn't keep up. The creatures lagged, the magic stalled. So the Yuyuan team called China Mobile, patched the network, and got things back on track. Lantern diplomacy in real time.

The zodiac blessing wall turned out to be the sleeper hit. Rows of glowing animals, each with its own plaque. Visitors lined up to find their sign, snap a photo, and ask staff what it all meant.

Which ones were lucky? Which ones were stubborn? Which ones cried in private but led in public? They took it seriously. No one drifted off.

For most, this was their first time doing anything like it. Not a tourist version. Just the real thing, lit up and waiting.

2025 didn't dial it down. The theme was All Things Beautiful, All Beings Marvelous – which sounds like a line from a wellness app, but played out as a dense, glowing world built on the back of the zodiac snake.

The scenes ran through forests, oceans, ancient beasts, and somewhere in there, four portals through time. The Shan Hai Jing was still the source material. Birds perched on dragons. Trees lit up from the inside. The whole thing pulsed like a living thing.

Romantic? Sure. Also a little surreal. But it worked.

Thirty years in, the Yuyuan Lantern Festival still holds the city's attention. It's loud, it's crowded, and it never really stopped growing. What started as a two-week event with a giant pig has turned into a year-round light show, stitched into the architecture of the mall itself.

It's not just a festival anymore. It's a fixture. Part commerce, part culture, part glowing spectacle people keep showing up for. And that says enough.