Name: The village making lanterns for Lunar New Year | BBC News
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T16:52:23.000Z
Duration: 2 min 31 s
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Wherever you go in Tunto, there's lantern making.

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And nobody seems to know just how many hundreds of years ago the craft started here.

But if you're born in this part of Hebei Province, it's all around you.

When you see others in your family doing it every day, you get the hang of it quickly.

And how old are villagers when they start making lanterns?

Kids can pick it up from around 10 years old.

Tunto's villagers grow corn and other crops, but

when they're not in the fields, they're working in the backyard businesses, which churn out a remarkable 80% of this country's lanterns.

So with China's own festive season just around the corner, demand is high and they're racing to fill the new year orders.

We can make lanterns up to 20 meters tall without any problem.

72 year old Baijunping told us he switched from carpentry to lantern making as a young man because the pay was better.

We are known as the Palace Lantern Village.

I asked how they felt about dedicating their lives to this.

Our lanterns can even be shipped overseas.

There are big factories in China making lanterns, but

we're told that they can't handle a variety of orders with diverse requirements in the same way these villagers can.

It is remarkable that in this day and age with high tech production lines and robotics, that these lanterns are still being made by hand in China.

What's more that these little family run businesses that have been doing the same thing for generation after generation have also been able to somehow maintain such a strong stranglehold on the market.

The locals say that these days, some of their children don't want to follow them into this line of work.

And eventually modern production may end up taking over.

But for now, it's this village which supplies China with its lanterns, keeping an important cultural symbol alive.

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The village making lanterns for Lunar New Year | BBC News

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