Compiled by C. ARUNO, KHOO GEK SAN and R. ARAVINTHAN
PENANG’S historic Tai Thong restaurant, known for being adorned with colourful handmade lanterns, will see fewer such decorations this year, as more lantern makers are retiring, reported Sin Chew Daily.
Each year, during the Mid-Autumn Festival season, visitors would throng the restaurant just to take photos of the thousands of lanterns hanging from its ceiling.
It is also known as a favourite pre-wedding photoshoot location.
According to manager Li Hui Ling, the establishment managed to sell 4,600 lanterns in 2022 but sales fell to only 3,900 last year – a 15% drop.
“Many of the lantern makers have grown old and retired. Fewer of these lanterns are now being made.
“However, we will still buy as many lanterns as we can. Every year, we will hang them up to continue promoting the culture,” Li said.
The dearth of lanterns also means that prices have risen by between 2% and 5%, she said, adding that the cheapest handmade lantern is now RM14 while the most expensive can cost up to RM48.
“So far this year, sales of traditional lanterns have been good. Every day, there are customers and tourists buying them,” she said.
The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Mooncake Festival or Pesta Tanglung in Malaysia, falls on Sept 17 this year.
> Scalper syndicates in China are snapping up free entrance tickets to tourist hotspots and selling them to tourists to make a profit, reported China Press.
These groups would use third-party programmes to book all of the available visitor slots to places such as the National Museum of China, which are supposed to be free, and sell them on social media.
China state broadcaster CCTV interviewed 30 tourists outside the museum recently and only two of them reported that they had secured their tickets from official sources.
The remaining 28 claimed to have bought them from scalpers.
The People’s Procuratorate of Haidian District of Beijing had brought a case against such a syndicate earlier.
Based on court documents, the computer programme the scalper syndicates designed can input personal details and automatically send back the verification code received to secure a ticket in under two minutes.
The syndicate charged in court was known to have adopted the same modus operandi to snap up tickets to the National Museum of China, Yulong Snow Mountain, Hunan Museum, and Shandong Science and Technology Museum.
They would then sell the tickets online for between 80 yuan and 150 yuan (RM50 and RM93) each, and reportedly raked in up to 300,000 yuan (RM185,700) a month.
The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.
