The Augusta Museum of History hosted a vibrant Chinese New Year celebration on Saturday, drawing in a crowd of guests interested in learning more about the tradition.
This is the first time the museum held an event celebrating the holiday.
The event, which honored the beginning of the Lunar New Year, featured traditional Chinese music, dance performances and an array of cultural displays including dancing lions, which were believed to ward off the monster “Nian” that was said to attack villages at the start of each year.
“This is our first year working with the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association to put on the Chinese New Year Discovery Day, and it’s been so much fun,” said Museum Manager Krystal Lyon.
Operating on a lunisolar calendar
Chinese New Year is an important holiday in China, celebrated at the turn of the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar. This calendar is based on the phases of the moon as well as the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
2025 is the Year of the Snake, the sixth zodiac animal of the 12-year lunar cycle calendar; the previous Year of the Snake was 2013.
According to Lyon, farmers celebrated the new year in the spring, because that’s when all the crops began to grow back.
“It made sense that that was when their new year started,” said Lyon.
Theresa Collier, who visited the museum on Saturday with her husband and son said this was a piece of information she was interested to learn.
“I did not know that the whole lunar New Year aspect of it…was due to farmers, and that they followed that calendar…based on the things that they needed to be aware of as time passed,” said Collier. “I didn’t know that’s where it originated from.”
Celebrating Augusta’s Chinese community
Lyon emphasized the importance of recognizing the contributions of the Chinese community to Augusta’s rich history.
“The Chinese community is a very big part of Augusta’s story because they built the canal,” said Lyon. “They were some of the main people that built the Augusta Canal back in the 1800s…where would Augusta be without the Augusta Canal?”
Lyon said that the museum has plans to continue this event from here on out, similarly to their semi-new Dia de los Muertos event which first kicked off in 2023.
