Welcome to the Year of the Tiger!

Although New Year’s eve waslast night, I got my first taste of New Year celebrations, Chinese style, on the way home from work last Monday: I was in the process of crossing the dual carriage way to get to my bus stop, and something rolled into the road and hit my foot. ‘That looks a bit like a firework’ I thought, but, being in the middle of a dual carriageway, I didn’t stop to investigate. Turns out it was a firework - about ten seconds later it exploded into a shower of blue and green sparks that lit up the road and sent a couple of cars swerving onto the grass verge. As I tottered towards the bus, eardrums ringing, I spotted the culprits -  group of old ladies huddled outside an aparment block lighting roman candles on the side of the road. The one in question had misfired, but not to worry, they had (literally) hundreds more where that came from and it was only a bit of practice for the main event.

For the past week or so, in the run up to Chinese New Year and the beginning of Spring Festival, Beijing’s skylines (not to mention the Beijing pavements and main roads) have been illuminated by some pretty impressive DIY pyrotechnic displays, so we were expecting something spectacular on the day itself. But not quite as spectacular, or terrifying, as it actually turned out to be.

Last night, to see in the Year of the Tiger, Beijing turned into a marginally less traumatic version of the Western Front. From the early afternoon, the streets began to empty of traffic. People would sporadically pop out of their apartment blocks to throw a string of extremely loud firecrackers onto the pavement and watch them take out a couple of dogs and maybe a tourist, and by late afternoon almost every shop, bank, kiosk and restaurant had closed its doors to allow the staff to go home to their families.

By the time we headed out of the apartment in the early evening there were rocket launches happening on evey corner, the sky was a sea of sparks and the air was think with the small of gunpowder. We stopped on the corner of our road to watch a group of guys letting of ffirecrackers until I took a direct hit to the eye, at which point we decided that underground travel might be the safest way to get to the Hutong we were headed for so we legged it to the subway. As usual, we were the only people who seemend to show any nervous reaction to the carnage: there were kids, old people and small dogs everywhere and none of them so much as flinched, even if they were actually holding a screaming, blazing heavy-duty firework as it went off (which seemed to be standard practice).

Apart from bleeding eardrums, we arrived safely at our friend’s apartment for a new year’s eve celebration which was authentic in every way apart from the fact  75% of the guests were westerners: two girls were churning out homemade jiao zi (meat dumplings that are the equivalent of Christmas turkey) and a tray kept appearing laden with shots of bai jiu, a very popular Chinese liquor which tastes like soil and acts like liquid nitrogen. As midnight approached we’d drunk enough of it to make jumping down onto the rickety balcony to get a better view of the fireworks a good idea.

And at midnight, everything went crackers. The sky turned into a riot of noise and colour as milions and millios of fireworks exploded across the city to bring inthe new year. Being seven stories up, I have no idea how many of them were part of organised displays and how many were DIY jobs, but they couldn’t have looked better. Seeing a city of sixteen million illuminated by the multi-coloured blaze of a billion fireworks is not really something you can describe very well, so I shall let Jamas’s photos do the talking - as always, the Chinese outdid themselves.

Happy New Year, China.