Shanghai Astronomy Museum Organized the Lantern Riddles Event on the Lantern Festival

The Lantern Festival is one of the Chinese traditional festivals, and its traditional activities include lantern show and lantern riddles. On February 5, 2023, Shanghai Astronomy Museum (SAM) organized an astronomy-themed special event in celebration of the Lantern Festival. The exhibits were presented from multiple dimensions and combined both modern and traditional elements, so that the audience could enjoy the amazing mixture of astronomical science and traditional culture during the event.

The exhibits in the exhibition area highlighted the correlation between astronomy, traditional festival and traditional literature, the riddles were related to the 8 exhibition themes including "moon phase" and "sun's neighbors", and there were the original souvenirs in the form of bookmarks corresponding to the lantern riddles that were designed to highlight the theme of "exhibition features + Year of the Rabbit + new year".

The intriguing event attracted large number of audience. After taking a ticket, the audience needed to find the exhibit corresponding to the riddle's answer and photograph it, and then confirmed the answer with the characters played by the workers at the site. They could relish in the festivity by watching the exhibits in the museum and solving the lantern riddles. Throughout that day, 500 tickets were distributed and over 220 sets of souvenirs were claimed, which was quite an impressive result.

The lantern riddles fair, a key part of the event, was organized at the first underground floor of the museum. The commentators dressed in Han Chinese Clothing and wearing rabbit-like headwear gave the audience an amazing presentation, and explained the scientific, historical and cultural knowledge behind the lantern riddles, which made the lantern riddles fair more valuable in terms of science education.

This event bridged the traditional festival to modern astronomy and linked the people to the cosmos, and thus received positive reviews from many participants. In the future, SAM will use its exhibition area and exhibits to organize more science education events, make more scientific knowledge available to more people, in order to encourage people to explore the starry sky, understand the universe and think on the future.