On the 15th day of the first lunar month, a special butter flower lantern festival lights up the Taér Temple in Qinghai. As a mecca for Tibetan Buddhists, the temple has just finished preparation for the festival and will soon receive its first batch of visitors.

This year's Butter Lantern Festival took local artists two months and more than 1,000 kilograms of butter to complete. Butter flowers are used to pay tribute to Buddha and often feature figures from Buddhism. They are also sculpted to represent mountains, pavilions, animals and plants.

Creativity runs freely through the limited artistic space in the temple. The largest butter flower measures two meters and the smallest is only 20 millimeters, but both are equally delicate.

Butter flowers originated in Tibet and were later passed to Qinghai, where local folk artists have been honing their skills ever since. In contrast to similar wax artwork in the West, butter flowers boast their own trademark features and are called "flowers" due to their vivid patterns.
 
(CCTV.com February 5, 2004)