Lighting up the world

Historical roots

In 2008, the Zigong lantern festival was listed as a national-level intangible cultural heritage for its long history, grandeur, innovative designs and ingenious use of materials.

Lantern festivals have traditionally been held in the town during the Lunar New Year to pray for blessings since the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties, and flourished during the mid-Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), as the city, known for producing salt, became a hub for merchants from all over the country. These deep-pocketed business people sponsored impressive lanterns of novel design during Spring Festival to display their wealth and entertain the workers who drilled for brine.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Zigong became a prosperous industrial city, proud of its salt, machinery making and chemical industries. In 1964, the local government started the annual Lunar New Year Lantern Festival, calling on businesses to design lanterns to be exhibited at a downtown park.

To outshine other exhibitors, enthusiastic workers outdid themselves with their yearly creations. They drew inspiration from Chinese zodiac animals, mythology, and literary classics for their motifs and designs. For materials, they chose silk, fiberglass and light bulbs, as well as more unexpected choices, such as CDs, porcelain tableware and silkworm cocoons.

Wan has made lanterns for over 30 years and specializes in using porcelain, including cups, plates, bowls and spoons, to make lantern sculptures like dragons and elephants, a traditional craft mastered by fewer than a dozen people in the city. In 2015, he was recognized as a city-level inheritor.

"Like every other Zigong native, I have a soft spot for lanterns, but it was my father who piqued my initial interest in lantern making," Wan says.

At college, Wan studied painting, which led him to think about how to integrate his art training, especially modeling and color theory, with lantern design.

After graduation in the late 1980s, he was assigned to work with the publicity department at a State-owned chemical fiber factory. "I often took advantage of public holidays or my annual leave to do lantern-making gigs around the city, and I really enjoyed it," he says.