Chinese New Year

Year s Eve in Germany, and Chinese New Year throughout the world in Chinese communities. 

People love the spectacle of fireworks. From Bastille Day in France to Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, from Chinese New Year to Canada Day, fireworks bring joy to celebrations all around the world. In the United States, about 100 million worth of fireworks are discharged every year in honor of Independence Day. Fireworks date back more than 1000 years to the discovery of black powder in China. This first gunpowder was brought to Europe during the Middle Ages and was used widely in weapons, in construction, and for fireworks. 

The largest human mass movement occurs each spring in China when 135 million migrant workers leave their factory jobs in China s smog-choked industrial cities to journey to their home villages in farmlands hundreds and thousands of miles away to celebrate the Chinese New Year. 

Fireworks are said to have originated in China more than 2,000 years ago. The story is that a cook mixed together charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter (all materials commonly found in kitchens thousands of years ago) in a hamboo tube. When the tube filled with these substances got too close to a fire, it exploded. A Chinese monk, Li Tian, then took this explosive mixture a step further. He attempted to find ways of controlling the explosion, thus creating firecrackers. Li Tian lived in Liu Yang, in the Hunan province of China, which is still a main center for the production of fireworks that are shipped around the world. Lighting firecrackers became a common event around holidays such as Chinese New Year, as ghosts... 

For the 1996 Chinese New Year celebration in Hong Kong, a string of firecrackers was lit with the explosions lasting 22 hours. 

Millions of these migrants are husbands and wives who left infant children in the care of grandparents in the villages as they sought better paying jobs in China s booming industrialized economy. If families cannot reunite for the New Year holiday, what s the point says one migrant in the 2009 film, Last Train Home, a documentary by Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan. 

More than 4,000 years old, traditional Chinese medicine continues to be widely practiced in China and in western countries. Traditional Chinese medicine teaches that good health is the result of harmony and balance between five basic elements earth, water, fire, wood and metal. Also important to health are the two types of energy Yin and Yang, constituting a vital substance that circulates through the body. Drug therapy has been one of the means used in Chinese medicine to keep these elements and the flow of energy in balance. Many of the same herbs used thousands of years ago in China could be the source of new pharmaceuticals in Western medicine... 

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