San Francisco has the world’s largest Chinese population outside of Asia and after two weeks of Chinese New Year celebrations, the city ushered out the Year of the Snake and welcomed the Year of the Horse with a spectacular Lunar Parade. This is one of the few night lunar parades left in the world and as luck would have it, we were in town to witness the event.
The lunar parade in San Francisco concludes New Year celebrations (in some places the grande finale is a Lantern Festival). The event roughly coincides with the first full moon of the lunisolar year; in this case, February 14th.
Photographers were out in full force looking for eye candy and the parade did not disappoint. The crowd-pleasers were the lions and dragons.
As the parade progressed the dragons got more elaborate and energetic as they danced around firecrackers. The grand finale was called the “final dragon” by those around me; it’s a 268 foot long Golden Dragon (“Gum Lung”).
According to the official parade website, it takes a team of over 100 men and women from the martial arts group, White Crane to carry this dragon throughout the streets of San Francisco. The dragon glowed and came with its own generator, housed in a pickup truck that followed closely behind.
In all, it was a pretty spectacular event and worth a visit.
