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A rolling barrage of fireworks greeted the Year of the Pig in Beijing as residents chased away any lingering bad spirits and celebrated the new moon in boisterous fashion.
Fortune tellers say this is a "golden pig" year, which comes around once every 60 years, so the Chinese welcomed it in particularly exuberant style, rattling the windows of downtown apartments and courtyard homes with the bangs and whistles of millions of fireworks.
Firecrackers are a traditional way of celebrating Chinese New Year and there were more than 380,000 boxes of firecrackers sold officially, compared with 240,000 boxes for the same period last year, which was the first year fireworks were allowed inside Beijing's inner city area.
The streets of the capital were ankle-deep in red paper from firecrackers at the start of the 15-day holiday, during which Chinese people around the world will fill their houses with red and gold objects, all considered auspicious.
Astrologers say that people born during the Year of the Pig are lucky, as a pig is a symbol of plenty, as well as of fertility, and many get married during the Year of the Pig to guarantee healthy, wealthy offspring.
The labour wards of Chinese hospitals are usually crowded around "pig" years - though with 1.3 billion people and a system already over-stretched, the maternity wards are always pretty full anyway.
Famous pigs include Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Woody Allen, David Letterman, Sir Elton John and Hillary Clinton.
Competing with the din of the fireworks were the trills of mobile phones as people sent text messages wishing each other a prosperous New Year.
Tens of thousands packed out the capital's temples, like the Lama Temple and Baiyun (white cloud) Temple to burn incense and pray for a prosperous new year. At Disneyland in Hong Kong, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck donned traditional Chinese garb to celebrate the new year.
Beijingers crowded traditional temple fairs, where they bought pork dumplings and caramel sweets blown into pig shapes, on a stick. Many of the millions of residents who come from other parts of the country have headed back to their hometowns already - at this time of year, the Chinese make more than two billion journeys by plane, train and bus to their hometowns in what is the globe's biggest annual human migration.
The Chinese diaspora around the world has been celebrating for days now. Last week, Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan was in Las Vegas to bring in the Spring Festival, joined by "Supergirl" Li Yuchun, who was watched by 400 million people when she won Supergirl, China's version of Pop Idol, in 2005.
Keen to stress that they are men of the people, China's most powerful leaders took to the countryside to spend time with some of the hundreds of millions of farmers who have been left behind by the country's economic boom.
President Hu Jintao fried dough twists, ate steamed potatoes and cut paper window decorations with poor farmers in the village of Daping in the north-western province of Gansu.
"Dear villagers, I come to wish you a happy new year. I visited Daping eight years ago. Today, I am very pleased to see lots of changes. New houses are erected and plenty of food is stored, which shows the lives of the Daping people have really improved," the President said.
There are fears that the widening gap between rich and poor could lead to social instability and threaten the rule of the Communist Party. In Gansu, the annual income of each farmer was estimated at 152 pounds last year, well below the national rural average of 240 pounds.
In true Communist fashion, President Hu urged all Chinese people "to elevate the spirit of Red Army veterans in the country's great cause of a new Long March - the building of a well-off society and socialist modernisation", the Xinhua news agency reported.
The Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, visited low-income families in Fushun city, a coal-mining centre in Liaoning province. For the next few weeks, no one will cut their hair or do anything which might threaten the impending good luck from the new year.
And if the South Korean fortune tellers who predict this could be the luckiest pig year in 600 years are right, it may be just the right time to keep your hair on.
- INDEPENDENT
