Last morning in Fukuoka, Friday, February 13th, 2026
By Ko Lyn Cheang, Staff Writer Feb 13, 2026 - San Francisco Chronicle
It was the Year of the Ox when the first public Chinese New Year celebration lit up the streets of San Francisco in 1853. Five years earlier, tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants had started arriving in California — “Gold Mountain” as it was known in Chinese — for the Gold Rush and had brought their traditions and culture with them.
“Today is the Chinese New Year, and the Celestials are making a grand holiday of the occasion,” a Feb. 8, 1853, article in the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California stated. “Fire crackers of all sorts are being exploded. Sacramento and Dupont Streets are lively with the moving multitude of Celestials rigged out in their finest toggery. They make a custom of paying visits and receiving calls on this day, as we do on the first of January, except that both sexes visit.”
Celestials was a common term used by American newspapers to refer to Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, a nod to the Chinese belief that the emperor ruled with a mandate from heaven.
Before San Francisco’s annual Chinese New Year Parade became the storied spectacle and economic engine it is today, drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees and an estimated 3 million broadcast viewers, it was a scrappy celebration led by immigrants determined to keep their traditions alive.
Chinatown locals celebrated among themselves for years. But 1953 marked the official start of the parade as a public celebration, open to all San Franciscans.
That year, Henry Kwock Wong, the newly elected director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, pitched the idea to the business group.
The lunar holiday is not traditionally celebrated with parades in China or other parts of the Chinese diaspora. The idea of a parade was borrowed from American traditions with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and military cavalcades as cultural cornerstones.
S.F.’s Chinese New Year Parade began as a bold experiment. See how it’s evolved through the decades
Greg
Quick and Dirty
It was the Year of the Ox when the first public Chinese New Year celebration lit up the streets of San Francisco in 1853. Five years earlier, tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants had started arriving in California — “Gold Mountain” as it was known in Chinese — for the Gold Rush and had brought their traditions and culture with them.
“Today is the Chinese New Year, and the Celestials are making a grand holiday of the occasion,” a Feb. 8, 1853, article in the San Francisco newspaper Daily Alta California stated. “Fire crackers of all sorts are being exploded. Sacramento and Dupont Streets are lively with the moving multitude of Celestials rigged out in their finest toggery. They make a custom of paying visits and receiving calls on this day, as we do on the first of January, except that both sexes visit.”
Historic photos of Chinese New Year festivities in San Francisco, left undated, right from 1938.
Courtesy the Society of California Pioneers / Chronicle Library
Celestials was a common term used by American newspapers to refer to Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, a nod to the Chinese belief that the emperor ruled with a mandate from heaven.
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Before San Francisco’s annual Chinese New Year Parade became the storied spectacle and economic engine it is today, drawing hundreds of thousands of attendees and an estimated 3 million broadcast viewers, it was a scrappy celebration led by immigrants determined to keep their traditions alive.
Even before San Francisco Chinatown’s Chinese Chamber of Commerce began hosting the Chinese New Year Parade in 1953, local Chinatown organizations held processions and festivals to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The Cathay Band and marchers holding anti-Communist signs walk through San Francisco on Feb. 12, 1951.
Gordon Peters/S.F. Chronicle 1951
Chinatown locals celebrated among themselves for years. But 1953 marked the official start of the parade as a public celebration, open to all San Franciscans.
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That year, Henry Kwock Wong, the newly elected director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, pitched the idea to the business group.
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The lunar holiday is not traditionally celebrated with parades in China or other parts of the Chinese diaspora. The idea of a parade was borrowed from American traditions with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and military cavalcades as cultural cornerstones.
Crowds in front of Far East Cafe on Grant Avenue during the Chinese New Year Parade in Chinatown, San Francisco on Feb. 15, 1953.
S.F. Chronicle 1953
Wong’s son, Wesley R. Wong, wrote in a book about his father that his dad wanted to “elevate the image of Chinatown and its residents by opening San Francisco Chinatown and its New Year Festival to non-Chinese tourists.”
In “Mr. Chinatown: The Legacy of H.K. Wong,” the younger Wong wrote that his dad dreamed of a parade that could “rival Mardi Gras in New Orleans,” dispel stereotypes about Chinese people and show “McCarthy advocates that Chinatown was not a bastion of Chinese communists, but rather a community of loyal Chinese Americans.”
The Chinese New Year Parade in Chinatown on Feb. 15, 1953.
S.F. Chronicle 1953
Wong and his friend Paul Louie approached Chinatown locals to donate time, money and resources to support the event, Wong said in a 1978 oral history.
Wong said the two men persuaded an electrician to hook up lighting, carpenters to build the stage, a man who worked in radio to set up a public address system, friends to provide more than a dozen convertibles and Chinese musicians to play. Wong, then a hardware business owner, donated nails.
Cpl. Joe Wong, a blind Chinese American Korean War veteran, served as the first parade grand marshal. A local woman, dubbed “Miss Firecracker,” presided as the parade’s queen, dressed in strings of firecrackers. Drummers, gong players, lion dancers and musicians from the Sixth Army band, Cathay band and St. Mary’s drum corps performed.
The Chronicle’s front-page coverage of the parade the next day — Feb. 16, 1953 — stated that 100,000 people attended, packing Grant Avenue shoulder to shoulder.
The first year that non-Chinese outsiders were invited to the New Year celebration was 1953 when 140,000 showed up.
Ken McLaughlin/S.F. Chronicle
“It was one of the biggest and gayest celebrations ever staged in the Chinese community here — the largest Chinese center outside the Orient,” the newspaper stated.
Three years later, the parade was broadcast on national television as a one-time special.
It attracted the attention of Bank of America, which became the first major corporate sponsor in the late ’50s, said Wayne Hu, 81, a second-generation parade director who helmed the event from 1986 to 2010.
By the late ’70s, the parade drew upward of 300,000 spectators, according to Chronicle reports from the time.
A dancing dragon jumps through firecrackers during Chinese New Year on Washington Street in Chinatown on Feb. 17, 1956.
Paul Quen/S.F. Chronicle 1956
“The parade in some ways became a metaphor for the growth of our overall community,” said Gordon Chin, the founding executive director of San Francisco’s Chinatown Community Development Center, as Chinese American populations have in the past century grown beyond historic Chinatown.
The parade often welcomed diverse groups. In 1979, the newly founded San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, now known as the SF Pride Band, made one of its first parade appearances in the Chinatown festival.
As the parade grew, David Lei, 77, who became parade director in 1977 and was involved until 2006, said he began importing Chinese artifacts to showcase, including an elaborate marriage procession and puppets of the Eight Immortals, figures in Chinese mythology.
By 1987, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce was struggling to financially support the parade and the accompanying Miss Chinatown USA pageant, Hu said.
The Chinese New Year parade winds along Kearny Street on Feb. 6, 1993.
Deanne Fitzmaurice/S.F. Chronicle 1993
Hu worked with KTVU for the channel to televise the parade for the first time. It became an annual broadcast. KTVU hired professional parade consultants to adapt the show for a television audience. By popular demand, the organizers started setting up ticketed bleacher seats.
“Our goal was that this is a community parade,” Hu said.
With new corporate sponsorships, the parade’s budget jumped from five figures to six figures, Hu said.
Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, said the parade gives the Chinese American community political visibility.
Cheong Wong touches up giant puppets — representing longevity, long life, good luck and other aspects of life — before being in used in the Chinese New Year parade on Feb. 2, 1994.
Eric Luse/S.F. Chronicle 1994
“When you have a parade of this scale and size, you’re not invisible,” Yeung said. “It creates a platform for us to have a conversation not only about what’s beautiful and wonderful about our community, but also what we need to move this community toward greater participation and equality in America.”
Perhaps no person used the parade as a platform for political advocacy better than the late Rose Pak, a Chinatown activist who led the growth of Asian American political power in the city.
Her annual tradition was to command the microphone from the grandstand and offer political commentary as politicians passed with their entourage.
In 2012, she called out to the police officers contingent: “Next year, I expect to see more Asian faces up here!”
The late Chinatown power broker Rose Pak on Clay Street in Chinatown in San Francisco in 2010.
Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle 2010
She issued warnings and poked fun at leaders, including then-District 3 Supervisor David Chiu.
“I haven’t made up my mind whether I’m going to run in District 3 yet, so don’t be too relaxed,” she said to Chiu.
Yeung said the upcoming parade on March 7, to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse, is particularly meaningful as immigrant communities continue to face threats from the federal government.
“The parade creates relationships with each other, within the community,” he said. “So when it comes time to take a stand, we know who’s with us. That’s what joy and love and celebration does.”