Lantern Art (Dongguan Thousand-Horn Lantern)

The Zhao clan of Dongguan are descendants of the Song imperial house, and it is said that in the early Yuan dynasty the family first began to fashion the Thousand-Horn Lantern, with twenty-four streamers attached; it is remade only once every ten years. Before the founding of the People's Republic it hung in the Pufanzong, the Zhao ancestral hall at Jieyuanfang, for the lamp-lighting rite when a boy was born to the clan. In the Dongguan dialect "Thousand-Horn Lantern" puns on "a thousand sons," carrying the wish for new life. The craft entered the first national ICH list in 2006.

The Thousand-Horn Lantern is enormous, built in five parts — crown, pillar, body, streamers and tail — with a bamboo-and-paper skeleton, coloured painting and glued decoration; the whole lantern bears a thousand horns and a thousand lamps in an extraordinarily intricate process handed down wholly by word of mouth and by hand. The streamers were once Song-dynasty relics kept by the Zhao family, later destroyed in the 1960s.

The Thousand-Horn Lantern fuses the memory of the Song imperial house, the clan's birth rites and the Lingnan paper-craft tradition; its sheer scale and craft are rare, and it is hailed as the "first lantern of China," winning first gold at the 2005 Shanfa Award for Chinese folk craft — a living sample vital to the study of Lingnan clan society and folk art.

The Thousand-Horn Lantern is often displayed and demonstrated at institutions such as the Dongguan Intangible Cultural Heritage Exhibition Hall.