Festivals · First day of the first lunar month — late January to mid-February. The country effectively stops for a week.
This is the big one, and nothing else is close. Several hundred million people travel home in the largest annual human migration on earth, cities empty out, and the family reunion dinner on New Year's Eve is the single most important meal of the Chinese year. For a visitor the paradox is that the busiest festival can feel like the quietest: shops shutter, offices close, and Beijing and Shanghai become unusually calm while the countryside and the smaller cities fill up. Temple fairs run for the first week, red couplets go up on every door, and the fireworks — legal again in many places after years of bans — are genuinely startling.
Eat — Dumplings in the north, sticky rice cake (年糕) in the south, and a whole fish that is deliberately not finished — the leftover is the point, 年年有余.
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