Lantern Festival at Chinese Garden

The Lantern Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival, commemorates the 14th-century revolution led by Yuan Zhang who smuggled notes inside moon cakes and used lighted lanterns as a signal to launch the revolt. One of the highlights of the festival is the Moon Cake Fair where hundreds of festive stalls line the streets of Chinatown selling an astonishing variety of moon cakes, traditional paper lanterns, decorations and other delicacies. Children parade down the streets with their brightly lit lanterns in the Children’s Lantern Procession. The Chinese Garden becomes a fairyland of lights and colours for the Lantern Festival, and there is also a range of cultural shows and performances including lion and dragon dancing, Chinese instrumentalists and craftsmen.
The whole of Chinese garden is lighted right from Chinese Garden MRT & usually there are different themes followed during the festival for the lighted showcase that is an attraction for all young and old at this place. This year the theme is the Sea, and there is a great variety of wonderful sea animals, fish, jelly fish, star fish, coral, etc. Aadi's favourite were the penguins and we had to stay there the longest. There were also lots of stalls with light-toys for kids, sparklers, and other tit-bits for one and all. Amol was happy to see the large variety of food stalls at the festival. I was personally very happy to see so many lights and so much colour, the whole place had a warm and welcoming feel to it. The different shapes and sizes of lanterns was amazing. There was also a huge lantern from Sri Lanka!!

The crowd was full of people with cameras and there were some kids trying their hand as well...The lake in the garden was full of beautiful figures of Chinese mythological figures, lotus flowers...and the way all this reflected in the dark water was simply beautiful!!
We, my family, Faisal's family & Chandrasekhar we all went for this wonderful festival & had a good time on Friday evening. We took lots of photographs..