Kaifeng Chrysanthemum Cultural Festival

Kaifeng Chrysanthemum Cultural Festival has run annually each fall since 1983, filling the former Northern Song capital with several million potted chrysanthemums across parks, plazas and heritage sites. The chrysanthemum is Kaifeng's official city flower, and the festival pairs the floral displays with Song-dynasty cultural sightseeing, tying a roughly 1,600-year-old flower-cultivation tradition to the city's historic identity.

Kaifeng was the Northern Song dynasty's capital when court chrysanthemum-appreciation gatherings first became an organised autumn custom in China, a tradition tracing back roughly 1,600 years but reaching its cultivation peak in this city before the Song court's fall to the Jurchen in 1126, and the modern Kaifeng Chrysanthemum Cultural Festival stages the same flower across the same streets nine centuries later.