Travelling in China during Chinese New Year: what is open, what is closed and whether to go

Chinese New Year falls in the Australian summer holidays, which makes it the first window many families consider for a China trip. It is also the one time of year when China does something no other country does: a quarter of the population goes home at once. Whether that is a reason to go or a reason to wait depends entirely on what you are travelling for. Here is what actually happens, so you can decide.

The dates

The festival follows the lunar calendar and moves each year. New Year’s Day falls on 6 February 2027, 26 January 2028 and 13 February 2029. The official public holiday is the eight days or so starting on New Year’s Eve, but the effects run far wider:

• The travel rush (chunyun) lasts about 40 days, from roughly 15 days before to 25 days after New Year’s Day. Trains and flights sell out, especially the week before and the week after.
• Factories and wholesale markets close for two to four weeks, usually from a few days before New Year to the Lantern Festival on day 15, and many workers do not return for a week after that.
• Small family restaurants and shops close for a week or more; the big chains, hotels and malls stay open.

What closes

• Factories, markets and offices. The Yiwu market, the Canton Fair complex, and essentially every factory in the Yangtze Delta and Guangdong shut from the week before New Year until after the Lantern Festival. A sourcing trip in this window is wasted; our business trips page and the Yiwu guide say so plainly, and we do not run them from mid-January to late February.
• Family-run restaurants, noodle shops, tea houses, tailors, small galleries. Closed from New Year’s Eve for anything from three days to two weeks. The food guide’s lane restaurants are the ones most affected.
• Some museums and galleries for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day only.
• Banks and government offices for the public holiday week, which does not affect tourists.

What stays open and gets busy

• The major sights: the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Yu Garden, the Bund, the Suzhou gardens, West Lake, the water towns, Disneyland. All open, all heaving with domestic visitors from day two of the holiday onward, and the passport-linked ones (the Forbidden City above all) hit their daily caps days ahead. Day one itself, New Year’s Day, is the quietest day of the year in the cities, because everyone is at home eating.
• Hotels, big restaurants, malls, chains, hotel restaurants: open, often with special menus, and full.
• High-speed trains and flights: running at maximum, sold out around the peaks. Book the day the window opens or travel outside the two peak weeks.
• Temples: open, and at their most alive; see below.

What is wonderful about it

• Temple fairs in Beijing. Ditan Park, Longtan Park and the Temple of Earth host week-long fairs with folk performers, stilt walkers, snacks, crafts and crowds in a good mood; this is the Beijing of old photographs and it only exists for ten days a year.
• Yu Garden’s lantern festival in Shanghai. The old town is strung with themed lantern installations from mid-January to the Lantern Festival; go on a weekday evening after dinner and before 9 pm.
• New Year’s Eve. Family dinner at home for the Chinese; for a visitor, a hotel’s New Year’s Eve banquet, or a walk through a decorated, half-empty city. Fireworks are banned in the city centres now, which disappoints people who remember the old chaos, but the suburbs and the countryside still go off at midnight.
• The Lantern Festival on day 15 closes the season with lanterns, sticky rice balls (tangyuan) and the last of the crowds.
• The welcome. If you are visiting relatives, this is the trip: the whole family is home, the food is the year’s best, and the children collect red envelopes. The visiting relatives guide covers the etiquette.

Prices and bookings

Hotel prices in the big cities rise 30 to 100% over the holiday week and fall sharply after the Lantern Festival; February after the festival is one of the cheapest months to visit China. Trains and flights price normally but sell out; the Shanghai to Beijing train for the days around New Year is gone within hours of release. The Forbidden City’s seven-day window needs an alarm set for 8 pm Beijing time. If you book a tour with us for this period we hold hotels early and book every ticket the minute it opens, and we tell you honestly which days will be crowded.

Who should go, and who should wait

Go if you are visiting family, if you want the temple fairs and the lanterns and can tolerate crowds at the big sights, or if you can travel in the quiet pocket: arrive on or just before New Year’s Eve, do the big sights on New Year’s Day and day two while everyone is still at home, then stay through the festival week for the fairs and leave before the return rush.

Wait if the trip is about sourcing, factories or any business; if you want the lane restaurants and the local Shanghai that the second-visit guide describes, most of which is shut; or if crowds at the Forbidden City or Disneyland would spoil it. The three weeks after the Lantern Festival, late February into early March, are the opposite: quiet, cheap, cold but clear, and everything reopened.

A sample New Year week in Shanghai and Beijing

The practical summary

Chinese New Year is the best week of the year for atmosphere and the worst for logistics. It rewards people who book early, start early each day, and go to see the festival rather than to avoid it. For everyone else, the month after it is one of the best-kept secrets in China travel. Tell us which you are and we will plan accordingly; the best time to visit guide has the full year’s calendar.