The workshops open before the city wakes up. On the outskirts of Zigong, a salt-trade city in Sichuan Province, four hours by high-speed rail southwest of Chengdu, lantern makers are already at their benches by early morning: bending bamboo into armatures, threading silk over painted frames, working expression into faces that will eventually stand three stories tall under festival floodlights. Every foreign visitor who travels to see them must now hold a completed China arrival card, the mandatory digital entry form that replaced paper border declarations across mainland China in November 2025. The form takes minutes. What the artisans are building takes months.
Zigong calls itself the City of Lanterns, and the title is not aspirational. According to China Daily, the city’s lantern industry employs 130,000 people across more than 1,000 enterprises, generating 6 billion yuan in annual output and commanding 92 percent of global supply. Since their international debut in Singapore in 1990, Zigong’s lanterns have illuminated over 80 countries and 500 cities. A craft that began as a folk tradition in Tang Dynasty temples has become one of the most consequential art-export industries in the world.
A Thousand Years of Light
The tradition traces its origins to the Tang and Song dynasties (618–1279), when lantern displays at New Year were already an established practice in the Zigong region. By the Ming and Qing periods, the form had evolved significantly: bamboo and wooden frames wrapped in silk, with designs drawn from mythology and imperial imagery; artisan families competing for the most elaborate installations; techniques refined across generations that are still in active use today.
Modern formalization came in 1964, when Zigong’s government organized its first official Spring Festival lantern fair. In 2008, the festival was inscribed on China’s national intangible cultural heritage list. Then, in December 2024, the Chinese Spring Festival, with the Zigong Lantern Festival as a representative project, was officially added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. That inscription carries weight beyond ceremony. According to cultural tourism research compiled by Hotelagio, UNESCO estimates that cultural tourism generates roughly 40 percent of global tourism revenues, while the heritage tourism market reached $604.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $778 billion by 2030. Zigong sits at the intersection of intangible heritage and experiential travel at precisely the moment both are expanding fastest.
What the Making Actually Involves
The techniques are more exacting than the finished spectacle suggests. Silk Frame Shaping requires the artisan to bend and tie bamboo into three-dimensional armatures capable of bearing structural loads. An 8-meter panda lantern is, beneath the silk, a precisely engineered object. Color-separated Pasting applies panels in distinct zones so that internal lighting produces clean gradients rather than muddied blends. Porcelain Tying and specialized blow-molding techniques carry their own discipline. Eleven formally recognized inheritors of the craft are responsible for transmitting these methods to the next generation.
“Each year, the festival needs to be more innovative than the last. To create even more spectacular lanterns, we must keep pace with new technologies and modern techniques.”— Liu Juncai, lantern craftsman, Zigong, 2025
Liu Juncai, 59, has been making lanterns for over three decades and has participated in 16 consecutive Zigong festivals. His 2025 panda installation, more than a month in the making, entirely handcrafted, was surrounded by golden snub-nosed monkeys and alpacas in a scene that read, from a distance, as photographic. At the 32nd festival, which opened January 23, 2026, the creative team introduced 3D modeling to character design for the first time. The centerpiece of that season was a Kunpeng, the mythical creature from the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, stretching 210 meters across the festival grounds and rising 32 meters into the night sky.
Going Global
In 2024 alone, 104 Zigong lantern projects traveled to 67 cities across 23 countries, a 15.6 percent year-on-year increase. In 2025, that figure grew to 112 projects spanning 85 cities in 19 countries. In the United States, Tianyu Arts & Culture, the leading producer of North American lantern festivals, welcomed 4 million visitors to 42 cities in 2025. March 2025 saw Zigong Lantern Group sign long-term cooperation agreements with France’s GL Events Group and Chile’s FISA Group, its first sustained foothold in South America.
The adaptation is as deliberate as the craft. In Singapore, 2025 lanterns featured the Vanda Miss Joaquim, the city-state’s national flower, woven alongside traditional New Year motifs. In France’s Gaillac, the festival incorporated local wine culture into the designs. The principle, as one Zigong entrepreneur described it, is to “connect through art,” letting the craftsmanship carry cultural exchange without requiring a shared language. Thirty-five years of international exhibitions have produced enough evidence to confirm that it works.
Before You Go
The Zigong International Dinosaur Lantern Festival runs annually from late January through the end of March, coinciding with the Chinese New Year and Lantern Festival. The festival grounds at China Colorful Lantern World are located within Zigong city; the nearest high-speed rail station connects to Chengdu in under two hours. All foreign nationals entering mainland China must complete the China Arrival Card digital form before crossing any border by air, land, or sea, a process that takes under 10 minutes and can be completed days in advance.
The lantern an artisan sets down at dawn will glow for thousands of people who will never learn his name. That asymmetry anonymity on one side, wonder on the other, is not a flaw in the model. It is what folk art has always been. Zigong has been getting it right for a thousand years.