Chinese New Year celebrations

It’s just past midnight in Chengdu, southwest China, and I’m still reeling from the city’s infamous Sichuan hotpot. The spicy concoction is a local tradition in Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan province – a rich broth made from beef and pig innards, locally-grown vegetables and enough Sichuan chilli peppers to make a grown man cry.

Chengdu will play an important role in next year’s Chinese New Year celebrations in Sydney, now the largest outside China. Each year, the City of Sydney asks a new Chinese city to get involved in the festival. In 2012, it will be Chengdu’s turn to showcase its culture and heritage. A gastronomic capital and garden city rich in art and history, Chengdu is the perfect place to inspire a 17-day long celebration of Chinese heritage in Australia.
 
Take hotpot for example. It’s the hallmark of Sichuan cuisine, celebrated for its easy preparation and emphasis on fresh ingredients. In Chengdu, no one knows hotpot better than Xu De Hai. He’s the assistant general manager of Tanyoto, a renowned 16-year-old Chengdu hotpot restaurant with over 100 sister restaurants around China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Next February, Hai will test just how hot Sydneysiders like their hotpot. He’ll be bringing 11 of his best dishes – including dumplings, pickled cabbage and Chengdu’s famous dan dan noodles – across the Pacific as part of the City of Sydney’s Chinese New Year celebrations.
 
“The Sichuan hotpot is famous all around the world,” Hai says. “It’s good, clean food that’s nutritious, tasty and smells great. It has a variety of colours and flavours that embody the Sichuan spirit of health and beauty.”

But don’t expect all the action to be served up on a plate. Chengdu is preparing something more than the standard fireworks, acrobatics and paper dragons. Teaming up with Foti Fireworks, the fireworks specialists responsible for Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, Chengdu will be contributing the Fire Dragon show, a combination of a 4,000-year-old traditional Chinese dance and a ‘cold’ fireworks display which features a shower of molten iron sparks that bathe the performance in a waterfall of light and heat. It’s breathtaking to behold – from a safe distance – and something that has taken the creative team a long time to perfect.
 
Mr Zhu, the show’s director, tells me the iron sparks are so tiny that they have time to cool in the air before landing on the skin and clothes of the performers. Although that’s not to say that it doesn’t hurt. “Yes, it burns them a little,” he laughs. “But they are used to it. We practise every day. They have tough skin.”
 
The festival’s Sydney Town Hall performance next year will feature dance, opera and theatre from the city’s 2,300-year history. The show is a colourful mix of acrobatics, comedy, tribal drums and Tibetan wedding dances, matched with vibrant costumes, peacock feathers and spinning castanets.

One of the acts in the show is the popular Sichuan entertainment of face-changing (‘Bian lian’), in which the performer wears a variety of richly-coloured masks, imperceptibly changing between them every few seconds. It’s regarded an artform in China and takes around ten years to master. Roughly about the same time it will take me to master the art of digesting the Sichuan pepper.

Sydney Chinese New Year Festival 20 Jan-5 Feb 2012.

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