Every year, LEGO releases several themed sets to celebrate the Lunar New Year. In 2021 (Year of the Ox), the set was a Spring Festival in a traditional garden. In 2024 (Year of the Dragon), the set was the LEGO Auspicious Dragon, made to look like a bronze statue on a stand.
LEGO Spring Festival Trotting Lantern
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2025 is the Year of the Snake, and LEGO is releasing three sets to commemorate the occasion. The first is a Lucky Cat. The second is Good Fortune, a pastiche of Chinese iconography that includes a decorative fan, a calligraphy pen and scroll, and golden ingots. The third, most luxurious set, which we built and photographed for this review, is a replica of a traditional trotting lantern. Like all LEGO builds with this sort of intentional focus, the lantern is much more than it appears at first glance.
We should take a moment, however, to appreciate its exterior. This model is detailed to the point of extravagance. Every inch of this set has something decorative attached to it – from the red lanterns that hang from the buttresses, to the gold detailing on the walls’ borders, to the walls themselves, which depict open sky and clouds framed by rocks.
Building the lantern is an exercise in layering. First you build the basic, core lantern. Then, you build the details to overlay on top of the build. And lastly, you build the details to layer on top of those details. There’s an anticipatory joy to this process – to realize that you’re not quite done, and there’s still even more detail to pile on top of it all. The now-retired LEGO Carousel is the last set that gave me this feeling of delight, of wondering what elaborate, decorative element came next.
Real trotting lanterns, which date back to the Han Dynasty, were powered by oil lamps. The light projected silhouettes of paper cutouts against the sides of the lamp. And meanwhile, the generated heat turned propellers, which in turn rotated the silhouettes.
The LEGO designers installed a mechanism to approximate this effect, albeit in a limited manner. An upright rod triggers a light brick, which makes the bottom of the lantern glow with yellow light. The light brick shines through a clear piece with black-lined image on it, causing the image to project on the lantern’s side. If you turn the aforementioned rod, the image will rotate around the lantern.
The packaging advertises that you can project the image from the lantern onto a wall or other surface. When I tried doing this, the image did project, but it was blurry and difficult to discern. I’m not sure why LEGO would promote this ability as a selling point – not only because it’s ineffective, but also because the original trotting lantern was never designed to do this anyway.
What’s more impressive is the upper tier of the lantern, which opens up to reveal three dioramas: a food stall that serves dumplings, a decorations stall, and a shadow puppet theater. That these dioramas are not apparent at first glance, but are instead nestled together like a Polly Pocket within the lantern’s cylinder, is a bit of visual foolery that relies on the average person’s poor perception of depth and space. The set comes with five minifigures, one of which has a snake costume on his head. The accessories include a plate of dumplings, a red envelope, a shadow puppet, and sets of chopsticks.
Whether you buy this set probably depends on which gimmick you’re buying it for. If you’re buying it for the lit-up, rotating mechanical effect, it is neither impressive enough nor visually clear enough to justify the price. But if you’re looking for something aesthetically stunning – that conceals some impressive minifigure-scaled scenery within an even more impressively detailed container – this set is a wonderful celebration of the Lunar New Year. It’s rated for anyone aged 9 and up, but it looks like an 18+ build based on its cumulative end result.
For more, check out our picks for the overall best LEGO sets, as well as the best Marvel LEGO sets and the most expensive LEGO sets.
Kevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He’s also been published in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.
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