Shi Xia Lantern Festival in Haining is famous for its exquisite needle-punched patterns, which integrates poetry, calligraphy, painting, seal cutting, epigraphy, embroidery and other artistic categories, including pavilions, birds and animals, dragon boat, exquisite balcony and hand basket. There are eight techniques of "weaving, bending, knotting, binding, engraving, painting, pasting and assembling" in the craft, and the production process includes binding skeleton, pasting, drawing and writing, and assembling. In addition, on the paper surface of the painting and calligraphy (with five layers of rice paper mounted), the space outside the painting and calligraphy pattern is removed with meticulous needling and shovel carving, and the needle is inserted. Its production is exquisite and extraordinary. A light color needs to pierce hundreds of thousands of holes, and more than one million or ten million holes. After acupuncture, the lights are transparent and colorful under the reflection of lights and candles.
Haining Shi Xia Lantern Festival is not only famous in the south of the Yangtze River, but also internationally. In the second year of Xuantong (19 10) 1934, he won the grand prize of "Nanyang Advocacy Association" and "Paris World Expo". Since the founding of New China, Haining has held many activities to welcome lanterns, which has promoted the development of Shi Xia Lantern Art and promoted the friendly relations between China and the people of other countries as an envoy of foreign cultural exchanges. Shi Xia Lantern Festival in Haining is a wonderful flower bred by Wuyue culture. It is beautiful, elegant and exquisite, which makes people linger.
Where there is light, there is opportunity. The custom of celebrating Lantern Festival in Haining is that Lantern Festival is the most prosperous on the 13th and 15th day of the first lunar month, and it is called Lantern Festival on the 18th. As a folk custom, Shi Xia Lantern Festival in Haining formed a lively situation of performing, chasing and fighting lanterns in Qianlong period of Qing Dynasty. It has become a common practice throughout the ages that people greet the lanterns spontaneously whenever the grain is abundant and the society rises. When playing lanterns, people carry all kinds of colorful lanterns on their shoulders, accompanied by the music of silk and bamboo bands and drums and cymbals, laughing and walking through the streets; The procession to greet the lanterns stretches for miles, and the crowds watching the lanterns are packed with people, all of whom are very happy and stay up all night. In recent years, it shows modern characteristics in lantern color technology. With modern lighting art, the lamp is full of sound, light and shadow, which is brilliant and dazzling, which is incomparable to the previous candle torch.
In order to develop this ancient lighting art, Haining established the "Lighting Research Association". Under the careful guidance of the old artists, nearly 100 lighting engineers gathered together to let this ancient art be passed down from generation to generation.