Red Paper Lantern Emoji

A red paper lantern, shown as a vertical oblong with horizontal bamboo ribs and a small flame or bulb inside. The Unicode name was originally IZAKAYA LANTERN and pointed at one very specific object: the 赤提灯 (aka-chōchin) that hangs outside a Japanese pub. In 2016, Unicode's CLDR annotations renamed it RED PAPER LANTERN to cover both the Japanese izakaya context and the Chinese Spring Festival lantern, which look almost identical and come from the same ancestor.

🏮 therefore sits in an unusual position for an emoji. The character was designed to evoke a specific Tokyo street scene, but the object it depicts predates Japan's use by about a thousand years. Paper lanterns appeared in China during the Eastern Han dynasty (25 to 220 CE), crossed to Japan during the Muromachi period (1333 to 1573), and became folding chōchin in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573 to 1596). Most users today read 🏮 as 'Chinese New Year' first, 'Japanese pub' second, and 'generic East Asian nightlife' third.

Red matters on both sides. In China, red is the color of wealth, joy and luck, and the word for lantern, dēng (灯), is a near-homophone for dīng (丁), male offspring, so hanging a lantern doubles as a prayer for a growing family. In Japan, the red chōchin was reportedly adopted by one Edo-era shopkeeper whose business then thrived. Red stimulates appetite and signals prosperity. Other shops copied him and the color became code for 'open for a drink.'

🏮 has four usage peaks across the year.

Lunar New Year (late January to February). The biggest spike. Posts about Chinese New Year, Vietnamese Tết, Korean Seollal and Mongolian Tsagaan Sar all use 🏮 alongside 🧧 (red envelope), 🧨 (firecracker), 🥮 (moon cake) and the zodiac animal of the year. Brand accounts time Lunar New Year campaigns to a 🏮 drop.

Mid-Autumn Festival (September or October). Second-biggest spike. Lanterns are central to the festival and 🏮 shows up next to 🥮 and 🌕 in posts about family gatherings, mooncakes and lantern riddles.

Japanese travel content (year-round). Tokyo street photography, izakaya reviews, Asakusa and Kaminarimon photos, ramen shop recommendations. The emoji reads as 'Japan at night.'

Chinatown aesthetic. Night markets, food tours, neon signage posts from San Francisco, New York, Yokohama, Melbourne, London. Whenever someone posts a photo of strung red lanterns above an alley.

One practical note: the emoji is not a generic 'Asian' emoji. Treating it as such is lazy and tends to annoy people. It specifically says 'paper lantern,' which is East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean) but not South, Southeast mainland, or West Asian.

Paper lanterns are a two-thousand-year-old Chinese invention that Japan adopted, modified and then claimed an emoji for.

The earliest paper lanterns appeared in China during the Eastern Han dynasty, roughly 25 to 220 CE. Buddhist monks lit lanterns on the 15th day of the first lunar month to honor Buddha, and the practice spread into a secular festival. The Lantern Festival (元宵节, Yuánxiāo jié) is still celebrated as the closing day of Chinese New Year, with red lanterns hung everywhere.

Lanterns arrived in Japan during the Muromachi period (1333-1573), initially as rigid ceremonial objects for temples and aristocrats. The major Japanese innovation came in the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573-1596), when craftsmen developed the collapsible frame: a spiral of split bamboo covered in washi paper that could fold flat. This made the lantern portable and democratized it. By the Edo period (1603-1868), mass-produced candles had made chōchin cheap, and ordinary people could walk city streets at night with a folded lantern in a pocket. Edo's Asakusa district became the lantern-painting capital, producing the bold calligraphic Edo-moji script still used on festival chōchin today.

The izakaya connection is specifically Edo-era. An aka-chōchin (red lantern) hung outside a drinking establishment was the visual signal that a place served sake and small dishes. The red color was a direct copy of a successful shopkeeper who, according to tradition, switched from white to red and watched his business take off. Every other shop copied him.

The most famous chōchin in the world is the giant red lantern at Kaminarimon (Thunder Gate), the entrance to Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa, Tokyo. It is 3.9 meters tall, 3.3 meters wide, and weighs 700 kilograms. Replaced roughly every ten years by Kyoto lantern specialists, the current lantern dates from the latest cycle. It is probably what the emoji's designers had in mind.

The emoji itself was approved in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as IZAKAYA LANTERN. Since emoji originated in Japan, early names often described Japanese-specific objects. When CLDR annotations were updated around 2016, the common name was broadened to RED PAPER LANTERN to reflect that most users outside Japan deploy it for Lunar New Year, not for drinking establishments.

1. 25Paper lanterns appear in Han-dynasty China. Buddhist monks light them on the 15th day of the first lunar month.
2. 1333Lanterns introduced to Japan during the Muromachi period as rigid ceremonial objects.
3. 1573Azuchi-Momoyama period craftsmen invent the collapsible chōchin with a spiral bamboo frame.
4. 1603Edo period begins. Mass-produced candles make chōchin affordable. Asakusa becomes the painting district.
5. 1865The original Kaminarimon (Thunder Gate) at Sensō-ji is destroyed by fire.
6. 1960Kaminarimon rebuilt with a donation from Panasonic founder Konosuke Matsushita. The giant chōchin returns.
7. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves 🏮 as IZAKAYA LANTERN, codepoint U+1F3EE.
8. 2016CLDR annotations broaden the common name to RED PAPER LANTERN to reflect global usage.
9. 2018Unicode 11.0 adds 🧧 (red envelope), 🧨 (firecracker) and 🥮 (mooncake), finally giving Chinese New Year a full emoji vocabulary that 🏮 had been carrying alone.

• •The giant red lantern at Kaminarimon gate, the entrance to Sensō-ji in Tokyo, is 3.9 meters tall, 3.3 meters wide, and weighs 700 kilograms. It is replaced roughly every decade by specialist lantern makers in Kyoto.
• •In Chinese, the word for lantern (灯, dēng) is a near-homophone for the word for male offspring (丁, dīng). Hanging a red lantern in the home doubles as a wish for a growing family, which is why lanterns are central to weddings as well as New Year.
• •The collapsible chōchin design came out of Japan, not China. Azuchi-Momoyama-era craftsmen invented the spiral split-bamboo frame around 1580, which let ordinary people carry lanterns in their pockets. Chinese paper lanterns were rigid until Japan reworked them.
• •Before Unicode added 🧧 and 🧨 in 2018, 🏮 was the only Lunar New Year emoji. A single lantern had to carry the entire cultural weight of the biggest human holiday on Earth. Timelines in late January 2015-2017 were mostly lanterns and red circle emoji.
• •In the red lantern's original pitch to Unicode, the object was a Japanese aka-chōchin specifically marked with the kanji for drinking establishment. Vendors rendered it without the kanji so it could work globally, which is why modern 🏮 looks generic enough to cover both Japanese and Chinese uses.
• •Red stimulates appetite at the neurological level. Restaurants using red decor and red lighting see measurable increases in average order size, which is part of why the Japanese aka-chōchin and the Chinese red lantern tradition both happen to hover over food.

• •Raise the Red Lantern (1991) — Zhang Yimou's film made the red paper lantern an international visual cue for Chinese tradition and domestic hierarchy. Lanterns are lit outside the favored concubine's courtyard each night. The emoji inherits some of that imagery whether users know the film or not.
• •Disney's Mulan and Mulan 2 (1998, 2004, 2020) — Red lanterns appear in every scene intended to signal 'China.' The ancestral temple, the matchmaker's city, the imperial palace, the festival sequences. Whole generations of Western viewers learned 🏮 from Mulan.
• •Spirited Away (2001) — Studio Ghibli's bathhouse is covered in red paper lanterns, and the film's 'Japan at night' atmosphere leans on them. For global viewers this was often the first exposure to the chōchin as a visual element.
• •Kaminarimon gate — The most photographed chōchin on earth. Tourists pose under it in roughly 30 million photos per year based on Sensō-ji's visitor counts. If you've seen any Tokyo travel content, you've seen this specific lantern.
• •The Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival (Taiwan) — People release thousands of paper lanterns inscribed with wishes on the 15th day of the lunar new year. The visuals are globally recognizable even to people who've never heard of Pingxi.

• •Codepoint: U+1F3EEU+1F3EE. Original Unicode name IZAKAYA LANTERN, CLDR common name RED PAPER LANTERN.
• •Shortcodes: :lantern::lantern: on Slack and Discord, :izakaya_lantern::izakaya_lantern: or :lantern::lantern: on GitHub.
• •🏮 renders as a single codepoint with no variation selector and no skin tone variants.
• •Adjacent in the Unicode block: U+1F3EFU+1F3EF 🏯 (JAPANESE CASTLE), U+1F3EEU+1F3EE 🏮 (RED PAPER LANTERN), U+1F3EDU+1F3ED 🏭 (FACTORY). The 1F3E-range has heavy Japanese representation because the block was designed around Japanese carrier emoji.
• •For Lunar New Year UIs, pair 🏮 with U+1F9E7U+1F9E7 🧧, U+1F9E8U+1F9E8 🧨, U+1F90FU+1F90F 🐉 or the current zodiac animal, and U+1F95FU+1F95F 🥟 / U+1F9C6U+1F9C6 🥮 for food context.

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