Photo essay: Chinese Lantern Festival takes center stage at Franklin Square with 90-foot dragon
The new attraction at this year’s festival is the Palace of Heaven, featuring multiple 40-foot-high lanterns.
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Philadelphia’s Chinese Lantern Festival features more than 1,200 works of art at Franklin Square this summer.
This year’s festival takes place during the Year of the Dragon. The classic 164-foot-long dragon will be on display, which is longer than three school buses and weighs 6,000 pounds. Standing at 21 feet, the head was installed with a 15-person crew. More than 70 pieces make up this one lantern.
The new attraction to this year’s festival is the 4,520-square-foot Palace of Heaven, featuring the Jade Emperor, other 40-foot-high immortals and a 90-foot-long blue and white flying dragon.
More than 100 people spent nearly 30,000 hours putting together the lanterns for this year’s festival. Everything was made entirely by hand, with silk fabric stretched over steel frames. A team of 30 people assembled the lanterns on-site over a one-month period. Artists used 19,000 square feet of silk and 164,000 feet of electric cable.
In addition to the dazzling lanterns, multiple entertainers, including a face changer, hula hoopers, teeter board balancers, chair handstanders, spacewalkers, balancers and folk dancers, will perform onstage at the festival during the evenings. Performers visiting from China include Jiang Kuo, Peng Changrong, Li Guohui, Zhang Jiaxu, Liu Huawei and Liu Xiang.
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Listen 5:16The fountain show will also be occurring throughout the night with choreographed water jets and LED lights synced up to multiple songs, including “Levitating” by Dua Lipa, “Beautiful Day” by U2, “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong and “Firework” by Katy Perry.
Philadelphia Chinese Lantern Festival schedule
- 6, 6:30 and 7 p.m. – Fountain shows
- 7:30 p.m. – Stage performances
- 8 and 8:30 p.m. – Fountain shows
- 9 p.m. – Stage performances
- 9:30 and 10 p.m. – Fountain shows
- 10:15 p.m. – Stage performances
- 10:30 p.m. – Fountain show
The festival runs through Aug. 18. Tickets for adults are $25 Monday–Thursday and $28 Friday–Sunday. Children between the ages of 3–12 can get in for $16.
Saturdays just got more interesting.
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