Take a gorgeous tour of China’s Lantern Festival with Google Street View

The Google Street View team recently sent its cameras into a few major tourist spots in China to get a 360-degree view of the scenery for this year’s Lantern Festival. This year, Google added three fresh sites in Shandong Province and Hong Kong. Below, we’ve embedded the interactive street view maps so you can take a virtual tour and see for yourself.

First off is my personal favorite, Tai’erzhuang in Shandong. The place was made into a monument after a battle between the Chinese Kumintang and Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Up next is the West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre in Hong Kong. This is a temporary structure supported entirely of bamboo. It’s put up every year for less than a month to celebrate Chinese New Year and the Lantern Festival.

And finally, here’s Zhoucun Main Street, also in Shandong. The historical Lantern Festival hotspot is lined with Qing Dynasty-era murals.

Lantern Festival is celebrated on the 15th day after the Lunar New Year. As part of the end of Chinese New Year celebrations, children traditionally go to temples at night to solve riddles on paper lanterns.

Google isn’t permitted to go about it’s normal street view mapping duties in Mainland China, but is sometimes granted permission to gather street view imagery for “special collects” such as these ones in Shandong, which are not part of the driving program.

If you want a more comprehensive street view for navigation in mainland China, we suggest Tencent’s QQ Maps.

(Source: Google Asia Pacific Blog)

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This article by Paul Bischoff originally appeared on Tech in Asia, a Burn Media publishing partner.