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                Lantern Festival Shines Light on Chinese Culture

   by Art Chimes

St. Louis Botanical garden event explores culture, history and folklore

   Even though the Saint Louis, Missouri area has a small Chinese
   population, the midsize city on the Mississippi River is going Chinese
   in a big way.
   The Missouri Botanical Garden, an urban oasis of plants, trees, flowers
   and biological research, is staging a Chinese Lantern Festival. And it
   is quite a show.
   At the 32-hectare Missouri Botanical Garden, musicians, dancers and
   other performers helped inaugurate what organizers say is first event
   of its kind ever staged in the United States.
   Dozens of artisans worked to create 26 displays highlighting culture,
   history and folklore from China. Some of the scenes are modest, like
   one featuring child-sized pandas, displayed amid a stand of their
   dietary staple, bamboo, growing in the Botanical Garden.
   Other lanterns are enormous, like the towering four-faced Buddha, whose
   golden silk costume sparkles in the sun, rustling in the breeze.
   At night, brilliantly illuminated, it appeals to local visitors like
   Darren Monahan. "I like the Buddha one, so far that's been my favorite.
   There's something very, very unique about it that just stood out to
   me."
   ''
   Other lantern displays conjure up folk tales or historical
   personalities. The Botanical Garden rejected some proposed contemporary
   lantern scenes, such as Disney characters and Hello Kitty, in favor of
   more traditional subjects.
   "I want to celebrate the Chinese culture and the history, so that this
   is an experience that is unlike anything anybody in St. Louis or the
   United States has seen," said exhibits manager Lynn Kerkemeyer.
   Chinese artisans came from Zigong, in Sichuan province, to create the
   lanterns. They did most of the work on-site, making the steel skeletons
   and covering them with hand-cut silk panels, stitched together using
   foot-powered, treadle sewing machines.
   It took four shipping containers to bring in all of the materials and
   equipment, including a ton of rice to feed the 33 artisans for two
   months while they worked here.
   They prefer the taste of rice from home, said Spencer Tan with
   LanternFest, the Chinese company that produced the displays, adding
   that food is "definitely" important.
   "I think that my policy is that, in order to move your people, the
   first thing you need to take care of is the stomach. So we bring our
   own rice. And not only that, we bring our own chef as well."
   ''
   Most of the lanterns are made of silk, lit from within. But perhaps the
   most impressive display in the Lantern Festival is one made of 40,000
   plates, spoons and cups hand-tied together with string to form a pair
   of enormous, undulating porcelain dragons. The two white creatures face
   each other contesting over a giant silk pearl between them. The display
   stretches almost 100 meters.
   And Spencer Tan said the dragons do more than look at each other. "The
   dragon heads start to move, there's smoke, and in between there is a
   pearl. The petal will open up, it will spin, and then smoke will come
   out from there."
   Biologist Mike Amspoker of Westminster College, about 180 kilometers
   away in Fulton, Missouri, brought his photography class to the
   botanical garden, unaware of the lantern festival.
   "This is, this is spectacular, and I can't believe that these are all
   plates," he said.
   The Porcelain Dragon is only one of several dragons on display.
   According to the Chinese calendar, this is the year of the dragon - a
   symbol of good fortune. And as China's acting Chicago consul general,
   Kun Lu, suggests, the dragon and other lanterns offer a good
   introduction to Chinese culture.
   "The people here in St Louis can look at the Chinese lantern and they
   can have the idea of the Chinese tradition. And also, it's very, very
   beautiful, especially at night. It's very, very vivid and very, very
   beautiful here," Lu said.
   The Missouri Botanical Garden is one of the world's leading plant
   research and conservation institutions. The Lantern Festival coincides
   with the garden's "Year of China" observance, marking decades of
   research and collaboration, including an ongoing project - The Flora of
   China - to document the more than 30,000 native plant species in the
   country.
   But on a cool, misty evening, that probably was not what attracted most
   Lantern Festival visitors like Ann Mitori, who said "there were
   pictures in the paper about this, but when you see it, life-size, it's
   just awesome."
   The Lantern Festival continues through mid-August at the Missouri
   Botanical Garden.
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   ese-culture/1150682.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/lantern-festival-shines-light-on-chinese-culture/1150682.html