Chinese New Year (Year of the Fire Horse) in 2026 falls on
Tuesday, 17 February. In preparation for it, the Chinese community in London has been putting up new lanterns. Lots of them.
You see lanterns strung up in Chinatown all year, and they didn’t look to my casual eye as though they are in need of replacing, until I saw the old ones on the ground after they were taken down.
I took these photos over two days – the first when I was with some other photographers and we happened to walk through Chinatown. The second time a couple of days later when I was walking to Covent Garden and came through Chinatown. The first and the last photos are from the second occasion.
The Fire Horse
The Fire Horse (Wu Wu) is one of the personalities in the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese Zodiac. In traditional Chinese metaphysics, the Horse is associated with the element of fire.
The year of the Fire Horse combines the fire of the Horse with the Fire element to make double fire, double energy.
The last year of the Fire Horse was sixty years ago.
In 1986 China was in a state of high-energy transformation. The student demonstrations began that year and eventually led to the Tiananmen Square confrontation in 1989 and the crackdown. Some estimates put the dead at 10,000.
Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Communist Party was a favourite of the reformers. The authorities blamed him for being too soft on the students.
The decision to remove him was finalised in late 1986. His death three years later was the catalyst for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Now in 2026, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has dismissed two of China’s most senior generals and basically torn apart the command structure of the armed forces.
Does Xi Jinping consider astrology? Is it in his DNA?
Does he think now is a good time to act and invade Taiwan because of the energy of the Fire Horse?
How might his calculation be affected by the recent actions of President Trump? It is not hard to think that Xi Jinping might consider President Trump to be less predictable than President Biden or President Obama.
Maybe a falling out about strategy is what led to the removal of the generals.
Whither now, China?
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