St. Louis Hosts Chinese Lantern Festival

An enormous, four-faced Buddha oversees the Chinese Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Garden. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

Dancers and musicians inaugurate America's first large-scale Lantern Festival. (A. Chimes/VOA)

The festival's opening featured the dragon dance, a traditional highlight of Chinese celebrations. (A. Chimes/VOA)

Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai are the "butterfly lovers" in a thousand-year-old tragic love story often compared to Romeo and Juliet. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

Giant smoke-belching dragons made of thousands of plates, cups and spoons, fight over a giant, silken pearl between them. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

A porcelain dragon by day. At right is the Missouri Botanical Garden's Climatron, a geodesic dome-covered, 2,200-square meter conservatory. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

The porcelain dragon's claw, showing plates, cups and spoons tied together with string. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

The Double Seventh Festival is observed each summer, on the seventh day of the Chinese calendar's seventh month, marking a tale of lovers who can see each other but once a year. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

This detail is from one of several lanterns featuring Flying Asperas, the supernatural maidens of Buddhist mythology. (V. LaCapra/VOA)

This display is called Panda's Paradise, and no wonder: the pandas are installed amid a stand of their favorite food, bamboo. (A. Chimes/VOA)

Workers touch up repairs to wind damage on the golden silk roof of the three-story tall Heavenly Temple. (A. Chimes/VOA)

Lanterns modeled on the famed Xian terracotta warriors stand guard at a Missouri Botanical Garden gate. (A. Chimes/VOA)