Despite widespread rain and snow, Lantern Festival is being warmly welcomed today across the country, bringing the long Spring Festival, or Chinese Lunar New Year, celebrations to an end.

Shops report that sales of sweet dumplings, a traditional food made of glutinous rice flour, usually served in soup, have surged in the past three days.

"We sold 50 boxes (500 kilograms) within six hours," said Huang Junyun, from one of the Ito Yokado supermarkets in Beijing that sells Sinian, a famous brand from Henan Province.

Unpackaged sweet dumplings top many shopping lists because of their lower price, but higher priced dumplings in delicate packaging are also popular as festive gifts.

Although producers market new flavors every year, sesame flavored dumplings are still most people's first choice.

This year, a sugar-free kind of sweet dumpling is proving popular since it meets the needs of older and diabetic people.

Many families also choose to have a big dinner tonight in restaurants, but the total number is less than that for the night before Spring Festival.

Xinhexuan Restaurant in Beijing said all of its fifty tables were booked then, but for Lantern Festival only two-thirds had been reserved.

Traditions to celebrate the festival, which can be traced back for more than 2,000 years, also include lantern fairs, lion and dragon dances, firework displays and riddle games.

In the southern province of Guangdong, lanterns in various colors and shapes, the main ones featuring roosters, line the path from the southern gate to the peak of the Baiyun Mountain in Guangzhou.

In many northern cities, ice lanterns are to take the place of the paper or plastic ones popular in warmer climes.

Foreigners living in China are also happy to join in the final climax of Spring Festival.

In Shenzhen, about 500 foreigners and overseas Chinese attended a grand gala in the Folk Cultural Village, a famous tourist attraction in the city, last night.

(China Daily February 23, 2005)