China Lights at Boerner Botanical Gardens this fall will feature Panda-Mania and tickets go on sale Wednesday
Visitors to the 2018 China Lights lantern festival at Boerner Botanical Gardens will be greeted by a colossal, three-story-tall Panda made of ping-pong balls before entering the festival grounds where promoters say they will encounter a shark and several other pandas among 45 lighted displays.
Panda-Mania is the theme of this year's festival, scheduled from Sept. 21 to Oct. 21, and there will be five separate lantern sculptures representing the bamboo forest habitats of giant pandas in China, said Shirley Walczak, the Boerner director.
All of the handmade lantern displays will be new this year, except for the 200-foot-long undulated dragon. The fierce monster — a popular stop for photos and videos along the festival's three-fourths-mile path through the gardens — will display new colors in 2018.
The public will walk inside a 65-foot-long shark sculpture to get a close-up look at how the internal frames of the lanterns are constructed.
Since 2018 is the year of the dog in the Chinese zodiac, the festival will include a pavilion-shaped lantern display with a dog lantern on top.
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Lantern festivals have been held in China for more than 400 years and Zigong City in Sichuan province is home to 600 lantern-making companies.
This is the third consecutive year that artisans from Tianyu Arts and Culture Inc., of Zigong City, have come to Milwaukee to create lanterns for the China Lights festival.
Thirty-two artisans will arrive at Boerner Wednesday afternoon to begin assembling lantern sculptures for this year's festival, said Huiyuan Liu, North American representative of Tianyu Arts and Culture. Many of the displays are made up of more than 1,000 separate components.
The artisans will weld metal frames for the lantern sculptures, light the frames from within using strings of LED lights, cover the framework in brightly colored fabric, and hand-paint finishing touches where necessary, Liu said.
The 2016 and 2017 festivals each drew more than 100,000 visitors from Wisconsin, the upper Midwest and beyond.
China Lights will be open from 5:30 to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. The event is closed Mondays. The festival will be open rain or shine but will close during heavy downpours or thunderstorms due to lightning.
The festival will feature a 6:15 p.m. daily "illumination parade" through the shrub mall at Boerner.
Stage performances will showcase Chinese folk arts and culture, with professional acrobats, martial artists and musicians from China. Schedules for the two performance stages will be posted at the gate.
There will be two dining areas with seven food vendors.
Tri-City National Bank is the main festival sponsor for the third consecutive year. We Energies sponsors entertainment.
Tickets can be purchased online at www.ChinaLights.org, a website that provides information on other ticket sales locations and parking at 10 fully-lighted lots. Tickets also will be sold at the Boerner visitors center, Milwaukee County Parks main office at 9480 Watertown Plank Road, and several county golf courses.
Ticket prices: $20 for adults ages 18 to 59; $12 for seniors; and $12 for children ages 5 to 7. A season pass provides unlimited visits for one adult at a cost of $50.
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Milwaukee was the first Midwestern city to host China Lights with the 2016 festival at Boerner.