Lions Dance as Australian Cities Ready for Lunar New Year Festival

Lion dancers are seen during Lunar New Year celebrations on January 31, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. (Jenny Evans/Getty Images)

Chinese lions have paraded along the streets of Sydney to launch a festival marking the beginning of the Lunar New Year.

The city has held the festivities since 1996 and it now hosts one of the biggest Lunar New Year celebrations outside Asia.

Appearing in Chinatown on Feb. 8 alongside a lion-dance troupe, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore said the festival was one of the city’s most important events.

Festivities will include art installations, lion-dance parades, dragon boat races and traditional performances across 16 days.

Chinatown’s Dixon Street will be decorated with a 5m-high dragon sculpture for the duration of the festival, along with four lunar gateways in traditional Chinese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese styles.

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Australia is home to about 1.4 million people with Chinese ancestry, the largest population for any non-European cultural group.

The year of the dragon will be marked in the 2024 Chinese calendar and Ms. Moore invoked the mythical animal as a symbol of “innovation and enterprise” as Chinatown underwent a A$44 million (US$28.64 million) revitalisation project.

“It marks the start of an auspicious year for our historic Chinatown area,” she said.

Several other Sydney areas will also hold Lunar New Year festivals, while large events will also take place elsewhere in Australia.

In Melbourne, thousands of people are expected to attend the Victoria Street Lunar Festival in inner-city Richmond.

Lunar New Year celebrations in the City of Sydney run from Saturday until Feb. 26.