Tunxi Fish Lantern Festival

Tunxi Fish Lantern Festival brings Huizhou's roughly 800-year-old fish-shaped lantern tradition, carp-like bamboo-and-paper lanterns paraded to symbolise water overcoming fire, into Tunxi Old Street's historic shopfronts and archways around the Lunar New Year Lantern Festival. Recognised as provincial intangible cultural heritage since 2022, the custom is more fully documented in nearby She County villages but stages its own evening procession through Tunxi's centuries-old commercial street.

Villagers in the timber-built settlements of old Huizhou once carried fish-shaped lanterns through their lanes as a coded wish for water to overcome fire, a real anxiety in towns built almost entirely of wood, and that roughly 800-year-old practice is the tradition now staged for visitors in Tunxi, Huangshan's old urban core, around the Lantern Festival that falls on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year.