Photo of a Chinese dancer at a Chinese New Year celebration in Maryland (2008).

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This photo has been picked up by the international multimedia news agency, Reuters, for web publication. Visit the Reuters 2/22/08 "This Week in Pictures" showcase, and scroll to the middle of the slideshow to see the published image.

Chinese New Year
Excerpt from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The lunisolar Chinese calendar determines Chinese New Year dates. The calendar is also used in countries that have adopted or have been influenced by Han culture (notably the Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese) and may have a common ancestry with the similar New Years festivals outside East Asia (such as Iran, and historically, the Bulgars lands).

Chinese New Year starts on the first day of the new year containing a new moon (some sources include New Year's Eve)[citation needed] and ends on the Lantern Festival fourteen days later. This occurs around the time of the full moon as each lunation is about 29.53 days in duration. In the Gregorian calendar, Chinese New Year falls on different dates each year, a date between January 21 and February 20. This means that the holiday usually falls on the second (very rarely third) new moon after the winter solstice. In traditional Chinese Culture, lichun is a solar term marking the start of spring, which occurs about February 4.

For the full content of this article, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_new_year. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Keywords:
Chinese holidays, Chinese New Year, chinese dancing, chinese dance, dancers, dances, festival, celebration, festivities, festivals, celebrations, culture, cultures, anthropology, cultural, Chinese-American, Chinese-Americans, Chinatown, Maryland, Montgomery County, Germantown, documentary photography, editorial, press photography, news, chinese arts, east asia, china, taiwan, reuters, this week in pictures showcase

Ref: 2008_0256-Edit

Location: Lakeforest Mall, Gaithersburg, MD

Photographer: Irene Abdou