Ahead of every Lunar New Year, Eng Lim would open dozens of boxes packed with bamboo hoops, red and gold fabric, and thousands of shimmering glass scales. These were the many parts of Dai Loong, or big dragon — the centrepiece of a parade that would wind its way through city streets to the clash of drums and cymbals.

The secret to assembling all 44 metres of Dai Loong had been passed down to Lim by the three Chinese Australians who’d done it for decades. It was fiddly work. Lim would spend weekends in empty warehouses building the dragon until, finally, a museum allowed it to be stored intact. But by 2000, Dai Loong was falling apart. So without telling anyone, Lim remortgaged her house to order a new “millennium” dragon from Foshan, China.

Her risk paid off when grants and donors eventually covered the cost. The processional dragon is one of the world’s biggest, requiring 100 people to carry it.

As with dragons that began parading in the gold rush towns of Bendigo and Ballarat more than a century ago, the creature has become a symbol of Chinese integration and culture, weaving its way through Melbourne’s CBD every Lunar New Year. It’s a mythical animal, says Lim, from “a fable, like reading Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella to children”.

In the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, Kelvin Tran is preparing a different kind of creature: giant dancing lions, each animated by two dancers, according to Chinese custom. But Tran’s team is not only of Chinese descent; it includes Vietnamese, Malaysian, Singaporean and Pacific Islander artists. “Having such a multicultural team represents how art and culture can transcend their country of origin,” he says.

Indeed, Lunar New Year extends well beyond China. Worldwide, at least 2 billion people will welcome in the Year of the Dragon, starting on February 10. Celebrations in Australia are some of the biggest outside of Asia, drawing nearly 1.5 million revellers in Sydney alone. But what is Lunar New Year? Where did the zodiac animals come from? And what does the dragon mean?

First, how is the date of Lunar New Year worked out?

In 1899, a Chinese scholar of bronze inscriptions, Wang Yirong, was sick with malaria when he was offered a remedy that farmers dug from the ground in Henan, a province in central China. The objects, “dragon bones”, were supposed to be crushed and drunk.

But the story goes that Wang took one look at the mysterious inscriptions on the objects, realised their ancient origins, and, having survived his bout of malaria, bought as many as he could to try to crack their code.

Today, archaeologists have recovered 150,000 of these oracle bones – pieces of turtle shell or oxen shoulder – buried since the late Shang Dynasty (1250BC to 1046BC), inscribed with some of the earliest examples in China of a mature writing system – and evidence of a lunar and solar calendar. On them, fortune-tellers have recorded a date and a question asked at that time – what was causing a king’s toothache, say, or could a battle be won?

Traditional Chinese calendars are based on 12 lunar months, each with 29 to 30 days, and a 13th leap month added every two or three years to prevent time from diverging from the seasons, not unlike leap years in the Gregorian calendar. Despite its name, the date for the Lunar New Year is calculated using the sun as well as the moon: it’s usually the second new moon after the winter solstice which, in the northern hemisphere, falls around December 22.

While the festival was once commonly referred to as Chinese New Year in Western countries (and is actually called the Spring Festival in China), the name Lunar New Year has become more popular, including as it does Vietnamese, Malaysian, South Korean, Cambodian and Thai cultures, to name just a few. “They are neither Chinese nor celebrating it as a Chinese festival,” says Jack Chia, an assistant professor of history and religious studies at the National University of Singapore. “Of course, it’s important to note there are influences – they’re adopting the festival based on a Chinese calendar system – but they have localised it in their own system and culture.”

What does the dragon mean?

The first time Russell Jack was near the jaws of the dragon was in 1945. He was 10 and beating a drum to help keep the other paraders in time. “That was my start of a career with the dragons,” the 89-year-old says. As a young man, he carried the head of Bendigo’s oldest remaining processional dragon, Loong, and the dragon that replaced it in 1970, Sun Loong. As an 84-year-old, he was helped with carrying Dai Gum Loong, which his daughter, Anita, oversaw the acquisition of in 2019.

Dragons have snaked along Bendigo’s streets since at least 1892 as part of a history of Chinese residents fundraising for the city’s hospital at Easter, an association that Russell says helped pioneer multiculturalism in the community. “When you put the briefing in the paper saying you wanted volunteers [to carry the dragon], it would fill up really quickly.” Sun Loong – which will come out of museum hibernation for this Lunar New Year – stretches for 100 metres and has 6000 scales made of silk, paper, rabbit hair and glass. About 50 people carry it. “In the head of the dragon, you had about six people changing over all the time. You couldn’t walk far,” Russell says.

‘After the dragon is the snake. It doesn’t matter how you dress the snake up, people would much prefer to have a dragon baby.’

Unlike the fire-breathing monsters of Western legends, Chinese dragons have divine rainmaking power, says Annie Ren, from the ANU’s Australian Centre on China and the World. Legends depict the creature sleeping at the bottom of oceans and rivers in winter before taking to the skies in spring to bring rain. The dragon dance is thought to have originated in ancient China ahead of farmers planting crops, says Ren. “It was necessary to waken the dragon from its winter slumber. For the Chinese, the dragon symbolises might, fertility, prosperity, and change.”

Little wonder it was an imperial symbol for emperors, “the sons of heaven”. “By the Song Dynasty [from 960AD], only the emperor himself could wear robes decorated with elaborate patterns of the dragon,” Ren says. “In the 20th century, the dragon lost its imperial significance and became an important nationalistic symbol of the Chinese state.”

Someone born in the year of the dragon is said to be confident, charismatic and a natural-born leader. US singer Rihanna, civil rights leader Martin Luther King jnr and martial arts star Bruce Lee (famous for his 1973 film Enter the Dragon and others) are among them. In fact, being born a dragon is so desirable that birth rates climbed in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia during dragon years in 2000 and 2012.

Whether this year of the dragon will turn around China’s population decline is yet to be seen. But, says University of Melbourne Chinese Studies associate professor Delia Lin, there’s something else at stake too: “After the dragon is the snake,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how you dress the snake up, people would much prefer to have a dragon baby.”

Where did the zodiac animals come from?

The dragon is one of 12 zodiac animals that are part of a complex numeric system known as the heavenly stems and earthly branches, which mark a cycle of 60 years in ancient East Asian cultures. Because this system was challenging for most people to understand, says linguist Eve Chen, Chinese rulers began using the animals to describe it, as well as to mark the months and even hours of the day. “The animals are really the symbols to teach the commoners the concept of time,” says Chen at the Australian National University.

One of the earliest references to the animals is on a bamboo slip (used before the invention of paper) discovered in a Qin (221-206BC) tomb in Yunmeng county, Hubei province, says Xiaohuan Zhao of the University of Sydney.

The creatures didn’t appear in their current sequence – rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig – until the Song dynasty. The Jade Emperor, a ruler of heaven in Chinese mythology, was said to have hosted a swimming race for them on his birthday and their finishing places determined the order. (Vietnamese have a water buffalo instead of an ox, and a cat instead of a rabbit.)

‘We may not believe any of these zodiac superstitions but we like to notice, hey, people among our birth years, they have similar characteristics.’

The zodiac signs give personalities to time, says Jonathan Sim of the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. “When you talk to the older generation, they remember animals. They ask you, ‘Which year are you?’ If I say, ‘I am 37 years old’, they say, ‘Oh yeah, a rabbit year.’” People born in the year of the rabbit are considered quiet, kind and thoughtful. “We may not believe any of these zodiac superstitions but we like to notice, hey, people among our birth years, they have similar characteristics.”

But just because it is someone’s zodiac year doesn’t mean their fortunes are bright. “I’m a certain type of dragon and it’s an up-and-down year for me next year,” says Mark Wang, chief executive of the Museum of Chinese Australian History. “There are five different dragons because there are five elements [wood, fire, earth, metal and water] and there are 12 animals – so there’s 60 different computations.” Depending on the year of your birth, you can be a wood snake, for example, an earth rooster, a fire rabbit, and so on, with certain personality traits associated with the various elements interacting with those of the zodiac animal.

(Then there’s the year of the golden pig, said to happen every 60 or 600 years, depending on which astrologer you ask, The Economist has observed. The last golden pig year, 2007, saw a surge in babies born – the one-child policy was still in place – as gynaecologists reportedly struggled to keep up and fears were voiced about increased competition for school places for this cohort down the track.)

Sim says lessons about not always controlling our fortune are at the heart of Asian astrology. “This is a strategy for being in harmony with time but also planning and working around time,” he says. “It’s about understanding our place in the universe and understanding our place in time so we know how to adjust our strategies to be happier, to live better, given the changing circumstances.”

Feasts, firecrackers and monsters – what’s behind the traditions?

The cleaning starts days before New Year in Pody Tung’s home in Melbourne’s south-east, as she discards old things and makes space for new. Tung decorates her house with red cloth and Chinese calligraphy known as couplets, draws the curtains and leaves lights on. “It brings good luck. The next day is always bright,” she says.

Throughout Asia, household decorations are generally not over-the-top, says Delia Lin. “New Year is really about complex calligraphy,” Lin says. “There will be just a few paper card decorations, and red things here and there. Somehow that cultural decoration hasn’t really gone with the commercialisation of it.”

Festivities might be modest in tone, but never in scale. Lunar New Year celebrations cause one of the biggest annual movements of people in the world. Nine billion trips are expected in China alone this year. In 2023, 26 million people travelled in South Korea, and Vietnam serviced 9 million domestic tourists as people moved around to be with family for a celebratory dinner.

At home, Tung follows rituals she learned from her family in Taiwan. She will prepare either eight dishes – a lucky number because the English word sounds like the Cantonese word for “prosperity” – or 10, which symbolises completion. On Lunar New Year’s Eve, her family will feast on chicken, barbecued pork, sweets and midnight dumplings. They take just a nibble of fish, which in Mandarin sounds like the word for surplus. “Every year, we have something left; you just take one bite.” The next day, she’ll attend a temple with both Buddhist and Taoist members, to pray, burn incense and watch lion-dancing.

In his household in Cabramatta, lion-dancer Kelvin Tran says pre-New-Year cleaning extends to personal grooming. “My parents are always like, ‘Get your hair cut now!’,” says the 24-year-old. In Vietnam, New Year is known as Tet (its full name translates to “festival of the first day”). People display tall bamboo trees called cay neu decorated with red ribbons, lanterns and bells to ward off evil spirits.

Before she migrated from Vietnam, Tran’s mother, Hi Than Chau, recalls going to flower markets to buy yellow blooms called bong mai at the cheapest prices possible. “Having those flowers is indicative of bringing in gold to the household,” she says. For dinner, the Tran family eats Vietnamese spring rolls alongside Chinese-style fish – his grandparents migrated to Vietnam from China. “You would see the cultures really morph,” says Tran.

‘A very important ritual was performed: to light firecrackers. Why? It’s not to celebrate but to scare away the Nian monster.’

Singaporeans put a messy twist on their celebrations. They prepare a plate of vegetables, sauces and raw fish and, after sharing blessings, toss it in the air to cover anyone within range. “It’s quite fun,” says Sim. “People still wear their best clothes.” Families often share a hot pot, too, a simmering broth into which they dip raw ingredients at the dinner table, replacing elaborate banquets. “Our kitchens have grown smaller and people are not learning how to cook from their parents,” Sim says.

For Chinese families, letting off firecrackers (now banned in hundreds of Chinese cities because of air pollution) and staying up late on New Year’s Eve hail from at least the 5th or 6th centuries. They’re customs related to another mythical beast, Nian, sometimes described as a flat-faced lion with the body of a dog. This hybrid creature lived in the sea and mountains and preyed on birds and people every New Year’s Eve until villagers learned it feared bright lights, noise and the colour red. “Before the meal, a very important ritual was performed: to light firecrackers,” says Zhao of the University of Sydney. “Why? It’s not to celebrate but to scare away the Nian monster.” (The new year is often referred to as Guo Nian, or to “overcome Nian”. Nian also means “year” in Mandarin.)

Another custom is gifting red packets of money to younger relatives, often with blessings (and sometimes, these days, without the red envelope, via direct deposit). “It’s like Christmas and New Year all in one,” says Tran. In some traditions, young people will offer their elders mandarin oranges in exchange. “They look like gold. The idea is, I’m wishing you prosperity,” says Sim.

While the red packets signify warding off evil spirits and wishing prosperity and luck, there’s a growing segment of young people who perceive Lunar New Year as too money-focused, Sim says. It’s not just the red packets: the festival is a time for gambling in some families, a custom of testing one’s luck for the year ahead. “We’re seeing an increase in the younger generation where they are losing that connection with Chinese culture,” says Sim.

And as with other family get-togethers around the world, young people often have to shepherd questions about their love lives and plans for the future during Lunar New Year – the last day of celebrations, the Lantern Festival, is similar to Valentine’s Day.

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