China's other festivals: Mid-Autumn, Dragon Boat, Qingming, Lantern Festival and Golden Week, and what each one means for your trip

The Chinese calendar has a festival every few months, and each one changes a trip: some close shops, some fill the trains, some put a race on the river or a moon over a lake that you would be sorry to miss. The Chinese New Year guide covers the big one; this is the other five, in calendar order, with the practical effect of each. The lunar ones move each year; the dates below are the usual windows.

Lantern Festival (Yuanxiao), fifteenth day of the first lunar month, February or early March

The last night of the New Year season. Lantern displays in parks and old towns (Yu Garden’s is famous and very crowded; the water towns of Zhouzhuang and Wuzhen are the atmospheric version, as the water towns guide notes), riddles hung on lanterns, lion dances, and sweet glutinous rice balls (tangyuan) in every house. Shops and restaurants have reopened by now, the trains are quieter than the New Year week, and it is a pleasant festival to arrive into. One-day holiday, not a public one; nothing closes.

Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping Day), 4 or 5 April

A solar festival, so the date is fixed. Families visit ancestors’ graves to clean them, burn paper offerings and picnic; the cemeteries on the city edges are jammed and the roads to them slow, and Chinese-Australian families often time a visit to relatives for it. For tourists it is a three-day long weekend when the sights are busier and the trains fuller; the spring blossom (Suzhou’s gardens, Hangzhou’s peach trees on the causeway, Beijing’s magnolias) is the compensation, and the best time guide rates early April highly. Nothing closes; book the trains.

Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu), fifth day of the fifth lunar month, late May or June

The festival honours Qu Yuan, a poet-minister who drowned himself in 278 BC, and the villagers who raced out in boats and threw rice into the river to keep the fish from him. Hence the two things you will see: dragon boat races, long narrow boats with twenty paddlers and a drummer, raced on rivers and lakes across the country (Suzhou’s Jinji Lake, Hangzhou’s Xixi wetlands, Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek and Dianshan Lake, Guangzhou’s Pearl River villages, and Hong Kong’s harbour, which has the biggest), and zongzi, pyramids of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, savoury with pork in the south and sweet with dates in the north, sold on every corner and argued about by every family. Children wear five-colour threads and sachets of herbs; doorways carry mugwort against summer illness.

Practically: a three-day long weekend; the races are on the festival day itself, mostly in the morning; Suzhou and Hangzhou are the best places on our routes to see one, and a guide knows the lake. The weather is early summer, warm and sometimes wet. It is a good festival to travel into.

Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu), fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, September or early October

The harvest moon festival, the second most important family festival after New Year. Families gather, eat mooncakes (dense round pastries filled with lotus-seed paste, red bean, nuts, or a salted egg yolk for the moon; the modern ones come in ice-cream, custard and every other flavour, in boxes given as gifts to every colleague and contact, as the gifts guide notes), and go out to look at the full moon. The places to see it: West Lake in Hangzhou, whose “Three Pools Mirroring the Moon” was designed for this night; the Bund and the Pudong riverside; a Suzhou garden if one is open late; the water towns with lanterns on the canals. Shops and malls run mooncake promotions for a month beforehand; the pastry shops sell the fresh, meat-filled Shanghai mooncakes hot from the oven with a queue outside.

Practically: a one- to three-day holiday; often it falls close to National Day and merges with Golden Week, below, which is the thing to check; the weather is the best of the year, as the autumn guide argues. A good festival to be in Hangzhou for.

National Day Golden Week, 1 to 7 October

Not a traditional festival but the one with the largest effect: a week’s national holiday when several hundred million Chinese travel, every sight is at capacity, the Forbidden City sells out its quota days ahead, the trains and hotels double in price, and the Bund has crowd-control barriers. Patriotic displays, flags, flower beds on Tiananmen Square, and the Wall shoulder to shoulder. Our advice is simply not to be in China that week; the myths guide says the crowds are the one cliché that is true, and only then. Arrive on 8 October instead, into the best weather and the emptiest sights of the year. The May Day holiday (1 to 5 May) is the smaller spring version with the same advice.

Smaller festivals you may meet

Laba (eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, January): temples hand out free laba porridge, and the Lama Temple’s queue is a Beijing winter tradition. Double Seventh (seventh day of the seventh lunar month, August): the Chinese Valentine’s Day, restaurants full of couples. Chongyang (ninth of the ninth, October): respect for the elderly, climbing hills, chrysanthemums. Double Eleven (11 November): not a festival but the world’s largest shopping day, when deliveries clog every lobby. The Shanghai and Beijing marathons and the big trade fairs are the other dates that fill hotels; the Canton Fair guide has Guangzhou’s.

Which to travel into

Tell us your dates on the contact page and we check them against the calendar; a day’s shift either side of a festival is often the difference between a race on the lake and a queue at the gate.