Shandong city celebrates Spring Festival in style

In the run-up to the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival on Feb 10, folks in the Weicheng district of Weifang city – located in East China's Shandong province – really got themselves into the festive spirit by viewing and taking part in a raft of handicraft events and other intangible cultural heritage or ICH activities.

The Shihuyuan ICH Space, for one, offered visitors the chance to make dumplings, write lucky characters and learn crafts such as paper-cutting, lantern making, New Year painting and leather carving.

Cao Yumei fashions a paper-cutting work that shows a dragon embracing the character "福", representing good fortune. [Photo by Ding Yanjun and Hao Peiru for chinadaily.com.cn]

At the ICH space, arts and crafts master Cao Yumei created a paper-cutting of a lucky dragon for the Year of the Dragon. "It's a dragon embracing the character '福', meaning good fortune," she explained.

Li Mei enthusiastically teaches visitors how to make a lantern. [Photo by Ding Yanjun and Hao Peiru for chinadaily.com.cn]

Elsewhere, Li Mei, a representative inheritor of the lantern-making technique of Weifang, made a small dragon boat lantern for the New Year. "It has a bell design on the dragon head, making the lantern shape more appealing and vivid," she said.

Weicheng district has been active in the protection, display, innovation and value transformation of ICH projects – and carrying out public ICH inheritance and promotion activities.

It's also organized wide-ranging cultural exchange activities, such as ICH overseas and urban cultural promotions, to create brand activities that resonate with people, as well as bolster the city's development with ICH. (Edited by Fan Yuanyuan)