Chinese Lantern Riddles

By Author: Lucy Carter
Total Articles: 102
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Lantern riddles are a Chinese tradition associated primarily with the Chinese Lantern Festival, as well as other festivals like the Chinese middle autumn festival. The Chinese Lantern Festival (in Chinese, "Yuan Xiao Jie") is held at the end of the 15-day Chinese New Year celebration. Also known as the Spring Festival, it is celebrated on the first night of a full moon during the lunar new year. The lantern riddles are riddles that are written on the Chinese lanterns created during this festival. Sometimes the riddles are also posted to walls for the public to read and enjoy, otherwise they are written for private amusement among friends. Hence, the festival is not only devoted to providing aesthetic pleasure through the art of lantern creation but is also a celebration of Chinese history and culture.

The Chinese derive great enjoyment from solving the lantern riddles and at temples on the night of the Lantern Festival people will hold lantern riddle parties. The riddles are either posted to the surface of the Chinese lanterns or to pictures of the Chinese Zodiac animals, and each paper lantern usually has four ...
... riddles each. The riddles are written on vertical strips of red paper and are attached to the lanterns with a string.

The lantern riddles provide a word, poem or phrase from which people must guess the answer. A riddle has three main characteristics, the first being that it consists of three main parts: the riddle, the hint and the answer. Also, a riddle is a play on the various meanings each Chinese character has and in order to guess the correct answer one must think hard to come up with the correct meaning that's intended. Thirdly, no character is repeated in between the riddle and the answer.

The lantern riddle tradition dates back more than 2,000 years to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), when it originated as a contest among men. The tradition reached its heyday during the Song Dynasty (960-1279) when it became popular throughout all of Chinese society. The first recorded reference to lantern riddles appears in Zhou Wu's memoirs of life in the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou. He tells of how people would paste poems and verses onto silk lanterns. Such poems and verses satirized events, included funny pictures of people, contained obscure words and hidden meanings, and made common jokes, all of which were supposed to poke fun at the reader. Lantern riddles have historically made reference to traditional songs, poems, stories or historical events. In ancient China, it was thought that solving a lantern riddle was as difficult as killing a tiger, so the riddles were nicknamed "lantern tigers".
Rob Payne is the founder of Hanging Lanterns, suppliers of Chinese lanterns.