Chinese communities around world welcome Year of the Pig

Chinese communities around the world welcomed the Year of the Pig yesterday, ushering in the Lunar New Year with prayers, family feasts and shopping sprees. In mainland China over the past week, hundreds of millions of people have crammed into trains, buses, cars and planes to reach family and friends in the world’s largest annual migration, emptying the country’s megacities of much of the migrant workforce.

Celebrations will take place across the globe, from Southeast Asia’s centuries-old Chinese communities to the more recently established Chinatowns of Sydney, London, Vancouver, Los Angeles and beyond. The most important holiday of the Chinese calendar marks the New Year with a fortnight of festivities as reunited families wrap dumplings together and exchange gifts and red envelopes stuffed with money.

Pigs symbolise good fortune and wealth in Chinese culture and this year’s holiday brings a proliferation of porcine merchandise, greetings and decorations. During the Spring Festival season -- a 40-day period known as “Chunyun” -- China’s masses will be on the move, chalking up some three billion journeys, Chinese state media reported. Streets and busy thoroughfares were uncharacteristically empty in Beijing on Monday, with many shops and restaurants closed until next week.

A growing number of Chinese are also choosing to travel abroad, booking family trips to Thailand, Japan, and other top destinations. An estimated seven million Chinese tourists will head overseas over the Spring Festival this year, according to the official news agency Xinhua, citing numbers from Chinese travel agency Ctrip.

Researchers have also traced the origins of the zodiac animal. Chinese archeologists found that China was one of the earliest places in the world to domesticate pigs about 9,000 years ago -- around the time when ancient Turkey began similar domestication practices -- based on research on pig bones excavated at Jiahu in Henan province, Xinhua reported.