Lunar New Year 2013

Lunar New Year 2013 takes place on Sunday, February 10. It is based on cycles of the lunar phase and for the Chinese it is also known as the 'Spring Festival'. Chinese New Year celebrations begin the evening preceding Chinese New Year's Day and provide an opportunity for families to get together for dinner. Food will include pork, duck, chicken and sweet delicacies and the family will end the night by setting off firecrackers. This year (2013) is the year of the snake.

Migrant mainland workers' happy homecoming

15 Feb 2013

Two of the millions of workers who went home for the Lunar New Year holiday took our video reporter along, offering a glimpse of joy and sadness in the life of a migrant family

1:15PM

Lantern Festival traffic and fireworks cause smog in Beijing

24 Feb 2013

Millions of migrant workers flowed back to cities on Sunday, formally marking the end of celebrations for the Lunar New Year period in China.

6:33PM

Lunacy of Lunar New Year travel must spur hukou reform

21 Feb 2013

The Lunar New Year travel crunch this year was worse than ever. It's deeply worrying because it underlines the distortions in China's urbanisation.

5:46AM

Flat sales down because of holiday

20 Feb 2013

Just 88 flats were sold from February 11 to 17 on the 50 major housing estates in Hong Kong monitored by agency Ricacorp Properties, down 19 per cent from 108 the previous week.

4:40AM

Officials chided for taking too many days off for Lunar New Year

19 Feb 2013

Long holidays can sometimes be too much of a good thing – as officials from Gansu and Hunan provinces are now learning.

1:01PM

Travel agency rebuked for Lunar New Year hotel fiasco

19 Feb 2013

The tourism watchdog on Monday rebuked a travel agency manager accused of leaving mainland tourists stranded without hotel accommodation after he claimed it had been impossible to verify whether...

7:27AM

Opinion

Workers pay the price for our bargains

5:20AM

Howard Winn

Barry Cheung makes waves in Moscow

3:47AM

Lunar holiday timing gives lift to cargo traffic

Air cargo throughput in Hong Kong grew 21.2 per cent last month year on year to 334,000 tonnes, according to the Airport Authority.

But passenger volume was down 5.1 per cent to 4.6 million...

3:28AM

Insider bears emerge ahead of Lunar New Year holiday

Directors were bearish in the run-up to the Lunar New Year, with 86 companies reporting disposals of their shares by directors worth a HK$998.6 million from January 21 to February 8.

4:05AM

China Digest, February 18, 2013

Sales of consumer goods totalled 1.7 billion yuan (HK$2.09 billion) for the week-long Lunar New Year holiday in Lanzhou, a 21 per cent increase from the holiday last year, Xinhua reports, citing...

4:57AM

CITY BEAT

Only time can tell what to make of this 'wicked' lot

In the annual ceremony at Sha Tin's Che Kung temple, Heung Yee Kuk chairman Lau Wong-fat drew a stick bearing the number 95. The message on the stick, loosely translated, read: "In a splendid...

5:09AM

CITY DIGEST

City Digest, February 18, 2013

About 30 Civil Human Rights Front members protested outside Stanley Prison yesterday in support of activist Koo Sze-yiu, who was jailed this month for nine months for desecrating Chinese and Hong...

4:34AM

It's time for Hong Kong to make its own luck

No matter how one spins these fortune sticks at the Che Kung Temple, as Heung Yee Kuk chairman Lau Wong-fat tried to, this is one of those "rituals" we need to let go of.

1:59PM