Pitty or not, but again I did not see fabulous fireworks during the Chinese New Year festivities. Partly due to the fact that I was too lazy to travel into the city and then, after watching around, fight with thousands of people for dozens of taxis. So I stayed home also during the 2 nights, during which fireworks should be most dramatic: The actual New Year’s night (this year from Saturday, 28-Jan to Sunday, 29-Jan) and five nights later (from Wednesday to Thursday) as this is the eve of the 5. day of the New Lunar Year, on which traditionally the money man is called with a lot of explosive to attract his attention and leave some money over the year. So while we westerners try to scare away evil daemons the Chinese try to get someones attention by doing fireworks!
Well, the area where I am living is probably not the hotspot of Chinese fireworks firing. Apartment security even tries to put some regulation on it: My Chinese reading skills are still limited, but I was able to (correctly, as confirmed later) guess that a sign in the middle of the round center square in-between our apartment houses actually asked people to fire their fireworks exactly here (intending: and nowhere else as cleaning up the stuff is quite some effort). The Chinese character for fire (火 huo) is a very picture-like character, easy to recognize, and appeared in three different variations on that particular sign, which ended in the also quite remarkable character for ‘dot, spot’ (点 dian).
Anyway, here are some low-impressive impressions of the eve of the money man (whose exact name I need to figure out):
01 (detail) – Looking on Yinshun Lu in the back of our appartment. Most light comes from the ordinary street lights…
02 (detail) – Fireworks from a battery inbetween our apartment houses, …
03 (detail) – …exploding exactly on the altitude of our apartment on the 13. floor
06 (detail) – Another apartment group; clearly to see that also they burn a lot of fireworks within their group houses, makes them glow pink in the dark. And some of the very rare high-altitude firworks in the far back.
08 (detail) – Another catch of a high-altitude firework, more close-by.
I had dropped the original idea of getting to the roof top of our apartment house to watch the scene in all Pudong simply because most fireworks do not reach above the apartment houses. As you can see in the above picture many things explode somewhere in the middle, say…hm….13. floor, exactly where we ar living 🙂
Reason might be that there are no rockets on wooden sticks like I know them from Germany. In Germany, the high-rising fireworks are mounted on top of a stick, the stick is put into a bottle, and the rocket then lighted. The stick provides a good stability and the rocket can fly very high before it explodes.
Here in China, however, by far most explosives are fired from carton batteries of a size of approximately 30 centimeters in all 3 dimensions. These batteries are made from 30 centimeter long tubes, 9, or 16, or more of them put together as a square. The battery is lighted somewhere once, and then all the tubes fire one after the other with a certain time gap. Something is blasted out of the short tube into the air and then explodes 30 or 40 meters into the air. Well…that’s 13. floor, and the houses around have something between 25 and 35 floors, so are a lot larger.
Categories: Shanghai
Originally Created: 02/05/2006 08:13:02 AM
Last Edited: 02/05/2006