China's most important festival runs for fourteen days from Feb 18 and ends with the Lantern Festival.

Here are five facts on the Lunar New Year:

• Also known as the Spring Festival, the Lunar New Year, starts on the first day of the first lunar month. Family reunions and ushering in luck for the year are the key themes.
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• Tradition specifies different customs for each day of the period; ranging from pre-festival house cleaning and hanging lucky poem couplets by the door, to visiting relatives, letting off firecrackers and wearing red clothes, an auspicious colour.
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• Hongbao, red paper wallets filled with cash by older married relatives are given to children, and also to employees by Chinese companies, as a new year bonus.
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• As in everyday Chinese life, homonyms - words that sound like other words - are important. Fish - "yu" - sounds like "plenty", "nian gao" or year cake sounds like "grow taller", and the wiry black moss "fa cai" is another tradition, because its name sounds like the expression for "get rich".
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• Celebrated enthusiastically by overseas Chinese communities from San Francisco to Auckland, lunar new year is also important in places influenced by Chinese culture like Mongolia and Korea.

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