Going totally crackers

Get ready for Beijing to ring in the Year of the Ox with a bang - hundreds of thousands of them. The amazing fireworks display will be jointly hosted by nearly all of the greater city's 18 million residents, who have stayed home and not visited their relatives across the nation.

It will crescendo at midnight on Sunday or Chuxi (Chinese Lunar New Year's Eve) and continue until Feb 9 within nearly every inch bounded by the Fifth Ring Road, apart from major sites like Tiananmen Square, the Asian Games Village and the Olympic Green.

"People set them off in the streets, in the gardens - you can see them just about everywhere," says Panda Fireworks vendor Fan Yajun, one of 2,000 certified sellers fireworks Beijing.