San Francisco's Chinese New Year Parade Celebrates the Year of the Horse With a Night March Through Chinatown
On the evening of March 7, 2026, San Francisco, California, held its annual Chinese New Year Parade celebrating the Year of the Horse. The parade stepped off at 5:15 p.m. at Second and Market Streets, wound around Union Square and ended at Kearny Street and Columbus Avenue, free for all to attend.
Presented under the auspices of the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the parade is the biggest parade celebrating Chinese New Year outside of Asia and one of the few remaining night illuminated parades in North America. It has been named one of the top ten parades in the world by the International Festivals & Events Association and by USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice awards. Its traditional finale is Gum Lung, the great golden dragon, carried through the streets of Chinatown after dark.
Over the same weekend, a Community Street Fair filled Chinatown: on March 7 and 8, more than 120 booths and concessions lined Grant Avenue between California Street and Broadway, with Chinese folk dancing, opera and drumming on an entertainment stage in the heart of Chinatown, making it one of the largest public celebrations of the season for the city's Chinese American community.
The City of San Francisco marks Lunar New Year with a season of events running from late January, including the Flower Market Fair, the Choy Sun Doe celebration in Chinatown, the Chinese New Year Run and a Lunar New Year concert by the San Francisco Symphony, as the Chinese American community and residents across the city welcomed the Year of the Horse.
Source: City and County of San Francisco
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：旧金山华人新年巡游的压轴金龙 Gum Lung（2013年往届巡游资料照片，非2026年现场）。Daniel Dionne 摄，CC BY-SA 2.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: Gum Lung, the golden dragon that closes the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade (file photo from the 2013 parade, not the 2026 event). Photo by Daniel Dionne, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
