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The Yi new-year fire festival — a torch-lit avenue built for a hundred thousand people in Xichang, and a fire-worship ceremony in Chuxiong. Follows the 24th day of the sixth lunar month, which falls in late July 2027.
Liangshan runs the festival as a prefecture-wide season, not a night. In 2026 it opened on 19 July and ran main programming to around 20 August — 98 events across all 17 counties and cities, on a “6+N” structure. The six headline strands were the torch-lore contests at Puge and Butuo (the most traditional of them: wrestling, horse racing, bull fighting and the beauty pageants), the costume-song-dance competition at Yuexi, a music festival, a barbecue carnival, the Xichang torch night, and an arts festival.
In Xichang itself the 2026 dates were 6 August for the opening and the Mountain Echo music festival on Xingyue Lake, and 8 August for the great torch night on Hangtian Avenue — 65 events across the city. Liangshan gives itself a week of public holiday around it.
Chuxiong ran 6–8 August 2026 at the Solar Calendar Culture Park, with the fire-worship ceremony each evening from 19:00 to about 22:35: fifteen events in four strands, including a 2,000-drone display, a mass left-foot dance, dragon-boat racing, a rock festival, heritage parades, Yi costume shows and street banquets. The old town at Yiren Ancient Town stayed open and free through 10 August with performances, bonfire dancing and night markets.
The main venues use real-name registration through Chinese-language WeChat systems, and none of them documents whether a passport works. This is the single biggest practical risk for a foreign visitor, and no English source we found mentions it at all.
The practical implication: if you are aiming at a main venue, sort the registration well in advance with local help, and keep a satellite venue as your fallback — those are open. We can check the current year's rules for you: message us on WhatsApp.
The lunar anchor is fixed — the 24th day of the sixth month — and it falls in late July 2027. Beyond that we will not commit: the sources circulating online disagree by several days, and in any case the prefecture-level programmes do not start on the lunar date. Liangshan opened nearly three weeks early in 2026, and there is no way to infer 2027's opening from that. Watch the Liangshan and Chuxiong government sites from about May.
Xichang has its own airport (XIC) and sits on the rebuilt Chengdu–Kunming line, with Xichang West station about three hours from Chengdu by fast train. Chuxiong is on the line west from Kunming; fly into Kunming Changshui (KMG) and continue by rail. We have not verified current timetables or fares from official sources, so check before you book.
Status: Exact dates for this edition have not been announced by the organisers yet — we publish the month only, and update this page when the dates are confirmed. Held annually on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month, with prefecture-level programmes running for weeks around it. In 2026 the lunar date fell on 6 August: Xichang's opening was 6 August with the great torch night on 8 August, while Liangshan's prefecture-wide programme had already opened on 19 July, and Chuxiong ran 6–8 August. The same lunar anchor falls in late July 2027 — sources circulating online disagree on the exact day, so we are not printing one. The 2026 editions are confirmed from official and state-media sources. Two things are not: the exact 2027 dates, and whether the real-name registration systems accept a passport — see below, because that is where a foreign visitor is most likely to come unstuck. Source: Xinhua's Sichuan service on the 2026 Liangshan and Xichang programmes, the Chuxiong municipal government and China Tourism News on the Yunnan edition, and the national intangible cultural heritage register (listing X-10, inscribed 2006) · checked 2026-08-22