Vigor of dragon and horse at Yuyuan Garden

Photo by Gao er'qiang / China Daily

Characters and scenes from love stories and fairytales are made into lanterns.

One features a Chinese legend about the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd. The two lovers move from two sides of a bridge made up of magpies and finally meet with each other.

The classical Chinese tale has it that the Milky Way separates the hard-working cowherd and the weaver girl, a fairy from heaven, who are very deeply in love with each other. They can meet only once during the evening of the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. And the day is also known as China's Valentine's Day.

The whole set of the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd lantern is 15 meters wide and 7 meters high. Multimedia have been applied in the making of the lanterns, according to Sun Yubo, a lantern craftsman from Yangzhou, Jiangsu province. Sun's team has made lanterns for the fair for two decades.

There are also lantern scenes from Western tales: Eve is handing over an apple to Adam at the biblical garden of Eden, and Snow White is hand in hand with the prince. Lanterns in the shapes of lotus flowers and red carps intersperse on the lake under the bridge.

Visitors can talk to a virtual guide on WeChat to learn stories of each set of lanterns by scanning the QR or quick respond codes beside them.

Enjoying lanterns and guessing riddles have been age-old Chinese traditions in Shanghai. The annual lantern show at Yuyuan Garden was declared an intangible cultural heritage unique to Shanghai in 2009.