San Francisco Chinese New Year

The festival

What is San Francisco Chinese New Year

San Francisco celebrates Lunar New Year with the largest festival of its kind outside Asia. The highlight is the nighttime illuminated parade, one of the few remaining in North America, which crosses downtown into Chinatown with floats, lion dancers, acrobats, martial arts groups, stilt walkers, school bands and, closing the procession, the Golden Dragon — a figure dozens of meters long carried by a team of more than a hundred people amid bursts of firecrackers.

The tradition dates back to the 19th century. During the Gold Rush, the small settlement that would become San Francisco received tens of thousands of people, including many Chinese workers who went to the mines and to build the railroads. By the 1860s, the community began celebrating the New Year with a parade — a format that didn’t exist in China — with flags, banners, lanterns, drums and firecrackers to ward off evil spirits, along Grant Avenue and Kearny Street. It was a way to show their culture to the rest of the city.

In 1958, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco took over organization and moved the parade to the evening. In the 1970s, the growing crowds and fire department concerns shifted the route to wider downtown streets, and from 1987 television broadcasts helped turn the date into a festival lasting about a month.

The program starts before New Year’s. The weekend before the date, Grant Avenue, Chinatown’s historic axis, hosts the Flower Fair with more than a hundred stalls selling fresh flowers, fruit, sweets and household items that families buy to start the year with luck. On the parade weekend the neighborhood’s street fair takes place, also on Grant Avenue, with stalls, food, folk dances, Chinese opera, drums and the parade’s giant puppets on display for photos. The calendar also includes the Miss Chinatown USA pageant, a road race and a basketball tournament.

The parade features the zodiac animal of the year on floats and costumes, and groups from schools, neighborhood associations, martial arts clubs and Asian communities of other origins in the city. The lion dance, with two performers under the same costume to the sound of drums, cymbals and gongs, also appears in front of shops and restaurants in Chinatown during the festivities to bring luck to businesses. Chinatown, one of the oldest Chinese neighborhoods in North America, is decorated with red lanterns throughout the period, and for visitors to California at the end of winter it’s the chance to see the neighborhood at its liveliest.