page_title: San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Chinese holding a dragon dance down the streets of San Francisco
context_page_description: The San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade is an annual event in San Francisco. Held for approximately two weeks following the first day of the Chinese New Year, it combines elements of the Chinese Lantern Festival with a typical American parade. First held in 1851, along what are today Grant Avenue and Kearny Street, it is the oldest and largest event of its kind outside of Asia, and the largest Asian cultural event in North America. The parade route begins on Market Street and terminates in Chinatown.
  Highlights of the parade include floats, lion dancers, elementary school groups in costume, marching bands, stilt walkers, Chinese acrobats, and a Golden Dragon. Observers can expect to hear at least 600,000 firecrackers, and are advised to bring ear plugs.
  The Golden Dragon is one of the highlights of the parade, considered the "Grand Finale" of the parade. It is made in Foshan, China and is 268 feet long, and takes a team of 100 men and women from the martial arts group White Crane to carry it.
  The parade is sponsored by Southwest Airlines and is hosted by the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
context_section_description: During the California Gold Rush, many Chinese immigrants came to San Francisco to work in gold mines and on railroads in search of wealth and a better life. The earliest recorded New Year's celebration was "a great feast" on February 21, 1851, and the first dragon dance in San Francisco was held for the New Year in 1860. In the 1860s, the Chinese community wanted to share their Chinese culture with others; they blended their traditions with a favorite American tradition—the parade—and held a parade with flags, banners, lanterns, drums and firecrackers. The San Francisco Call noted the holiday in an 1892 article, writing that "no nation [celebrates] the New Year ... with greater rejoicing and feasting than the Chinese", adding that "[m]any white residents who at other times united in saying 'the Chinese must go' find it convenient to invade Chinatown during the holidays and freely partake of Celestial hospitality. Some go further than this and try to carry off everything that is not nailed down."
  In 1951, a week-long celebration included an anti-Communist parade with the theme "Torches of Liberty", staged by the Chinese Six Companies and attended by a crowd of 10,000. Special police permission was granted to use firecrackers. The 1952 event was similarly colored by anti-Communist sentiments. During the Korean war, a group of Chinese-American leaders, led by H. K. Wong, expanded the parade into the San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival for February 15, 1953, including art shows, street dances, martial arts, music, and a fashion show. Wong, frustrated by news coverage of gambling arrests in Chinatown, believed that educating Americans about the most significant Chinese holiday would turn around the bad press: "Many celebrants who come to Chinatown for this grand New Year never knew that Chinese New Year was celebrated privately prior to 1953. The introduction of the Chinese New Year Festival in 1953 eliminated that 'mystery Chinese' feeling of people outside of the Chinese Community." Wong organized a Chinese New Year Festival committee, whose members included restaurateur Johnny Kan and businessman Paul Louie.
  The 1953 parade was led by Grand Marshall Joe Wong, a blind Korean war veteran, featuring the Miss Chinatown festival queen and of course the dragon; that year marked the first modern San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival intended for the wider public. A crowd of 140,000 watched the parade. The celebrations were expanded to three days in 1954. In 1955, the Festival lasted for a week and concluded with a parade up Grant Avenue. The celebrations were shortened to three days in 1956, and the parade was moved into the afternoon so it could be televised. A new dragon the length of a city block, later stated as 150 feet (46 m), was imported from Hong Kong for the 1957 parade. By 1958, the festival queen contest had been formally expanded into the pageant of Miss Chinatown USA. The festival resumed its week-long duration by 1963, including a street carnival that was held since at least 1960. The carnival was criticized for having little cultural connection to Chinese New Year traditions, and the Wah Ching attempted to burn it in 1968; the gaming booths were discontinued for the 1969 Festival.
  The parade has since developed over the decades into one of the grandest nighttime illuminated parades in the US, and one of the largest celebrations of Asian culture outside of Asia, although it has been criticized as presenting an inauthentic "stereotypic and fossilized" or "chop suey image" of Chinese culture. The cost of tickets to the pageant and carnival meant that relatively impoverished Chinese American families could only afford to attend the crowded parade, in effect excluding those whose heritage the Festival was meant to celebrate. The 1977 Parade included a wedding procession in an attempt to introduce more "authentic" cultural content; this was the brainchild of organizer David Lei, newly hired that year by the San Francisco Convention and Visitor's Bureau, which had become a co-sponsor in 1963. 
  In 1981, an estimated
caption: Procession of the Dragon (1892)
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