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Also known as Spring Festival, Beijing’s favorite holiday is celebrated with a cacophony of fireworks, let off night and day across the city. There are also temple fairs with stilt-walkers, acrobats, and fortune-tellers. Everyone who can heads for their family home, where gifts are exchanged and children are kept quiet with red envelopes stuffed with cash so adults can watch the annual Spring Festival Gala on national television.

Coinciding with a full moon, this festival marks the end of the 15-day Spring Festival celebrations. Lanterns bearing auspicious characters or in the shape of animals are hung everywhere. It is also a time for eating the sticky rice balls known as yuanxiaio.

Also known as Qing Ming, which literally means “clear and bright.” Chinese families visit their ancestors’ graves to tidy them up and make offerings of snacks and alcohol, an event that often turns into a picnic.

A reminder that China is still a Communist nation, Labor Day is celebrated with a week-long holiday, which marks the start of the domestic travel season. Shops, offices, and other businesses close for at least three days, and often for the whole week. Don’t plan on doing any out-of-town travel during this time.

Drums thunder and paddles churn up the water as dragon-headed craft compete for top honors. The festival remembers the honest official, Qu Yuan, who, the story goes, drowned him-self 2,500 years ago after banishment from the court of the Duke of Chu. Shocked citizens threw rice cakes into the water to distract the fish from nibbling on his body, hence the wholesale consumption of these delicacies on this date every year.

Also known as the Harvest or Moon Festival, this is traditionally a time for family reunions and for giving boxes of sweet and savory mooncakes (yuebing).

Cricket season in Beijing has nothing to do with the genteel English game. The Chinese version involves ruthless antennae-on-antennae action as cricket-fanciers goad their insects into battle in the plastic bowls that serve as gladiatorial arenas. Once the favorite sport of emperors it now takes place in backstreets all over town.

Marking the anniversary of Mao’s 1949 speech in which he declared the foundation of the People’s Republic. Crowds turn out to watch massed parades of high-kicking soldiers, and a jam-packed Tian’an Men Square is colored red by a sea of hand-held, waving flags.

Not a traditional Chinese holiday but the festivities have been adopted via Hong Kong, which means that there is a stress on the commercial aspect. High-street stores are bedecked with Shengdan Laoren, the Chinese version of Father Christmas.

Although overshadowed by Chinese New Year, which takes place soon after, Western New Year is still a public holiday throughout China.