Page 198 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A-Z 191

Lantern for a wedding feast

The first Feast of Lanterns was an occasion par excellence for families to vie with
each other in producing artistically decorated lanterns. These were often so cleverly made
that they spun round, driven by the heat of the wick, in the shape of dancing children or
little horses. Scholars made ‘lantern poems’ and wrote them on the shade in the hope that
passers-by would understand them. With this feast of lanterns the New Year festivities
reached their climax, and thereafter life would resume its normal tenor.
Women were said to like walking along under lanterns, in the belief that they would
be fertile (correlating deng = lantern with ding = adult male liable for military service).
Dian deng = ‘lighting the lantern’ is then phonetically suggestive of dian ding = ‘add
a son (to those one already has)’.