Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. It is the longest and most important festivity in the Lunar Calendar. The origin of Chinese New Year is itself centuries old and gains significance because of several myths and traditions. Ancient Chinese New Year is a reflection on how the people behaved and what they believed in the most.

Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the Chinese new year vary widely. Here I summarize ten folk typical folk customs for Chinese New Year. Hope it can help you understand better about these complicated festivities.

Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) is the happiest moment of year for Chinese people. Happiest moment must have happiest music. Here I selected ten happiest Chinese folk music for you. Wish you a happy new year of the tiger!

Folk festival music, a major tributary of Chinese folk music, has strong characteristics of secular music. It is good at the expression of lively scene of carnival, and rendering festive atmosphere.

Folk traditions and customs of the New Year meal vary across China: Northerners eat dumplings, Southerners eat rice dumpling, Nian-Gao; In Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and other places, people eat Tangyuan, either deep-fried or broiled. In one word, “Customs are different from area to area even if they are located only more than 50 kilometers away from one another.”

Here, I will show you some examples how Chinese people in different regions start their New Year with the first meal.

According to Chinese calendar, this year, Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) is on February 14th, the same date for western Valentine’s Day. Theoretically, these co-incidences should happen every 19 years on average, but the next Spring Festival/V-Day won’t come until 2048, which is 38 years later.

Now Chinese people especially young lovers are facing a dilemma.

China is the third largest country in territory in the world after Russia and Canada. However, few people think of China as a desert nation, yet it is among the world’s largest. More than 27%, or 2.5 million square kilometers, of the country comprises useless sand (just 7% of Chinese land feeds about a quarter of the world’s population).

Ironically, here, I am not going to talk about environment conservation. I will show you five most “beautiful” deserts in China.