In August 2026, Fuling District of Chongqing, China, will host its first "Flower Sea Lantern Festival," featuring 68 large-scale lantern installations. These lanterns are scattered across terraced fields, lakesides, and forest trails, perfectly combining the local thousand-year-old history and culture with traditional lantern-making techniques to create a picturesque and dazzling night scene.
This lantern extravaganza incorporated Chongqing's urban characteristics and millennia-old history into its lantern designs. All the lanterns were handcrafted by over 100 artisans using the traditional techniques of "Zigong lantern-making," a Sichuan provincial-level intangible cultural heritage, showcasing an exceptionally high level of craftsmanship.
One of the highlights of this lantern festival is the themed lanterns incorporating elements of the "Baiheliang Inscriptions," vividly recreating stone fish, inscriptions by literati throughout history, and hydrological carvings, bringing the thousand-year hydrological history of this "underwater stele forest" to life. In addition, the "Eight Scenic Spots of Fuzhou" lantern area uses a fantastic interplay of light and shadow to transport visitors through time, allowing them to experience the ancient atmosphere of a thousand years ago.