16 Insane Facts About China's New Year Holiday That Makes Our Kumbh Mela Look Small

The Chinese New Year is the country's largest festival. Governed by the Lunar Calendar, it can fall anywhere between January 21 to February 20, and was on February 5 this year.

But in this entire period, all of China is busy celebrating, which leads to some interesting stats. Like seriously crazy milestones!

Much like our Kumbh Mela in India, China generates mind-boggling numbers of all kinds for its annual Lunar New Year festival.

Images courtesy: Reuters

Everyone is travelling

- So far, 415 million people took domestic trips during the Lunar New Year.

- Officials forecast at least 3.4 billion trips will be taken in total during the holiday period, 8.6 percent more than last year.

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- Around 225 million passengers will travel by train, up 4.6 percent from a year ago.

- 3.1 billion of these will be road trips (9 percent more than last year). Meanwhile, 43 million passengers will travel by boat, and 35.5 million by flight (5.2 percent more than 2012).

Actually getting anywhere is hard

- At least 8.6 million fliers will pass through two of the three airports in Shanghai alone.

- These two handled 78 million passengers in all of 2012. In 2019, they expect to see 66,800 flights in just the festival month.

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Image courtesy: Xinhua

- To put into perspective, more than 10 percent of Shanghai's annual domestic flight volume will be in this period.

- The Guangdong Expressway (in the province of the same name) saw a 5 km-long gridlock on the Chinese New Year.

Some industries are minting money

- On January 15, train tickets to major cities sold out in 20 seconds on the railway website. This was the first day you could get tickets for peak days, Feb 6 and 7.

- 2.65 million tickets sold on that single day.

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- China's domestic tourism revenue during the holiday amounted to 513.9 billion yuan ($75.8 billion). That's about Rs 5.3 lakh crore, if you can process that number.

- Shoppers spent a trillion yuan, or $149 billion, at restaurants, malls and on online purchases.

- Singles also tend to "rent" boyfriends or girlfriends to take home to the family. These rentals have in the past gone up 884 percent in the time before the new year.

Fireworks and warm wishes

- Despite their own pollution problem people can't resist lighting fireworks of their own on the day. In 2013, the city of Hong Kong alone launched nearly 24,000 fireworks that night.

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- It's also very dangerous. A few years ago, over 50 people lost their lives to firework accidents during the three day new year period.

-Sending postcards with wishes can be expensive, so people text them instead. Four years ago, statistics show people sent over 31 billion texts during the festive season.