Singapore's Chinatown Reinvents Mid-Autumn: Giant Street Lanterns Dropped After 24 Years as Handwritten Community Lanterns Take Centre Stage
SINGAPORE — The most noticeable thing about Mid-Autumn in Singapore's Chinatown this year was something missing: the large-format street lanterns that had hung over Eu Tong Sen Street and New Bridge Road for 24 years were not there. The Chinatown Festival Committee moved the 2026 celebration off the main roads and back into the neighbourhood, making lanterns handwritten with residents' own well-wishes the centrepiece of a community programme that ran from September 11 to October 4 around Kreta Ayer Square and Banda Street. The festival day itself fell on Friday, September 25.
In the committee's press release, its chairman, Peh Cheng Hoo, explained the change: when Chinatown's Mid-Autumn tradition began 24 years ago, large street lantern displays were rare in Singapore, but similar installations can now be found at Gardens by the Bay and Jurong Lake Gardens, so the committee decided it was time to focus on the local community instead. Chinese New Year will keep its street-lantern treatment; the change applies to Mid-Autumn, at least this year. From September 11 to October 4, residents and visitors could write personal well-wishes on lanterns at booths at Kreta Ayer Community Club and at grassroots events run by the Kreta Ayer-Kim Seng grassroots organisations, with the finished lanterns progressively added to community displays at Kreta Ayer Square and Banda Street.
The headline event, titled Light a Lantern, Share Your Blessing, was held at 6 p.m. on September 19 at Kreta Ayer Square, combining a community lantern procession with mooncake and tea appreciation and lantern riddles posed in Singapore's four official languages. A lantern design competition ran the same day at Kreta Ayer Community Club, and Smith Street hosted an afternoon of cultural activities from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., including lion dance and wushu performances, a talk on traditional lantern-making, ukulele music, community singing and heritage games, alongside paper cutting, calligraphy, handmade crafts and fan dyeing. A lantern painting competition was open to children aged seven to 12, and three smaller neighbourhood editions were held at River Place, Havelock View and Chin Swee-Hong Lim. Admission across the programme was free, with Chinatown MRT station (NE4/DT19) the nearest stop.
Chinatown — Kreta Ayer — is Singapore's historic Chinese quarter, and its Mid-Autumn celebration has been an annual fixture for the local Chinese community for 24 years. This year's edition deliberately traded spectacle for participation, inviting residents and visitors to make, write on and carry lanterns rather than simply photograph them. Visitors who came specifically for giant street lanterns were directed to the large displays running in the same period at Gardens by the Bay and at Lights by the Lake at Jurong Lake Gardens, while Chinatown's 2026 festival presented itself, in the committee's framing, as a neighbourhood celebration.
Source: Compiled from the Chinatown Festival Committee's press release as published by chinatownsg.com in September 2026, and event listings by mustvisit.sg and everydaypeople.sg.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 新加坡牛车水宝塔街街景（牛车水原貌馆一带），CC BY-SA 4.0（Wikimedia Commons，摄影：kallerna）
