Auspicious flowers win favor of Chinese customers as Spring Festival draws near

Flower sellers across China are seeing their auspicious varieties sought after by customers who began to decorate their home in the run-up to the traditional Spring Festival.   

Colorful bromeliads and butterfly orchids are typically seen as lucky symbols for the new year, and this year in flower markets across China, they are in plenty supply as usual.

In Luohe City, central China's Henan Province, flower farmers said butterfly orchids are now the prime choice for customers coming to pick a plant to decorate their houses and many of them said they choose butter orchids because of their bright colors.

"The Spring Festival is just around the corner and I've come to buy some potted flowers to decorate my home. Butterfly orchids have bright colors, so I plan to put some of them in my home to warm up the atmosphere for the near year," said Luo Xiaobei, a customer.

Boxes of potted bromeliads are also sent to south China's Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area city cluster from Ganzhou City of east China's Jiangxi Province. The auspicious plants have a long flowering period and are thus highly welcomed on the market.

The rising demand is at the same time fueling the development of flower cultivation technologies. In Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, butterfly orchid farmers have been cooperating with universities and research institutes to develop new varieties and technologies and they said that annual sales of the flower reached over 200 million yuan (over 27 million U.S. dollars) over the recent years.

"Technologies are used to promote flower induction and to prevent and control pests and plant diseases. We have also made the pots with more permeable materials and are using air-conditioners to simulate the natural environment so that we can induce flowering throughout the whole year and ensure plenty supply to the market," said Zhu Guangchang, a butterfly orchid farmer.

The upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year falls on Jan 29, 2025, with an eight-day public holiday running from Jan 28 to Feb 4. 

Auspicious flowers win favor of Chinese customers as Spring Festival draws near

The death toll from a landfill collapse in the central Philippine city of Cebu has risen to eight by Monday morning as search and rescue operations continued for another 28 missing people.

The landfill collapse occurred on Thursday as dozens of sanitation workers were working at the site. The disaster has already caused injuries of 18 people.

Family members of the missing people said the rescue progress is slow, and the hope for the survival of their loved ones is fading.

"For me, maybe I’ve accepted the worst result already because the garbage is poisonous and yesterday, it was raining very hard the whole day. Maybe they’ve been poisoned. For us, alive or dead, I hope we can get their bodies out of the garbage rubble," said Maria Kareen Rubin, a family member of a victim.

Families have set up camps on high ground near the landfill, awaiting news of their relatives. Some people at the site said cries for help could still be heard hours after the landfill collapsed, but these voices gradually faded away.

Bienvenido Ranido, who lost his wife in the disaster, said he can't believe all that happened.

"After they gave my wife oxygen, my kids and I were expecting that she would be saved that night because she was still alive. But the night came and till the next morning, they didn't manage to save her," he said.

Death toll in central Philippine landfill collapse rises to eight