LEGO Lunar New Year 2025 Lantern Revealed

Year after year, LEGO marks the Lunar New Year with a series of special themed sets. For the 2021 Year of the Ox, the collection featured a Spring Festival scene set within a traditional garden. The 2024 Year of the Dragon brought the Auspicious Dragon, a set styled to resemble a majestic bronze statue on a stand.

LEGO Spring Festival Trotting Lantern

$129.95 at Amazon | $129.99 at LEGO Store

With 2025 being the Year of the Snake, LEGO is launching three new celebratory sets. The first is a charming Lucky Cat. Next is the Good Fortune set, a rich tapestry of classic Chinese symbols featuring a decorative fan, a calligraphy pen and scroll, and golden ingots. The third and most elaborate set—which we assembled and photographed for this review—is a detailed recreation of a traditional trotting lantern. True to LEGO's focused design philosophy, this lantern holds far more depth and detail than a first look might suggest.

How We Built The LEGO Trotting Lantern

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Before we delve into the mechanics, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate the exterior. This model is extravagantly detailed. Every inch is adorned with decorative elements—from the red lanterns suspended from the buttresses to the golden accents along the wall borders, and the walls themselves, which showcase scenic vistas of open skies and clouds framed by rocky outcrops.

Constructing the lantern is a masterclass in layering. You start by building the basic core structure. Next, you add a detailed overlay that fits on top. Finally, you apply an additional layer of intricate details on top of that. This process creates a wonderful sense of anticipation—the delight of realizing the build isn't complete and that there are still more ornate elements to add. The last set to give me this same feeling of joyous discovery was the now-retired LEGO Carousel, where I continually wondered what elaborate decoration would come next.

Historically, trotting lanterns date back to the Han Dynasty and were powered by oil lamps. The light would cast silhouettes of intricate paper cutouts onto the lantern's sides. Meanwhile, the heat generated would spin propellers, causing these silhouettes to rotate.

The LEGO design team incorporated a mechanism to mimic this effect, albeit in a simplified way. A vertical rod activates a light brick, making the base of the lantern glow with a warm yellow light. This light shines through a transparent piece with a black-lined image, projecting that image onto the lantern's side. Turning the rod then rotates the projected image around the lantern.

The packaging highlights the ability to project the image onto a wall or other surface. In testing, the image does project, but the result is blurry and hard to distinguish. It's unclear why LEGO emphasizes this feature as a key selling point, not only because it's somewhat ineffective but also because projecting images outward wasn't the original purpose of a trotting lantern.

What is genuinely impressive is the lantern's upper tier, which opens to reveal three detailed dioramas: a dumpling stall, a decorations stall, and a shadow puppet theater. The magic lies in how these scenes are completely hidden from the outside, cleverly nested together like a Polly Pocket within the lantern's cylindrical form. This clever visual trick plays on our typical perception of depth and space. The set includes five minifigures, one wearing a snake costume headpiece. Accessories feature a plate of dumplings, a red envelope, a shadow puppet, and several pairs of chopsticks.

Your decision to purchase this set will likely hinge on which feature appeals to you most. If you're primarily interested in the illuminated, rotating mechanical effect, it may not be impressive or visually clear enough to warrant the price tag. However, if you're seeking an aesthetically stunning display piece—one that hides intricate minifigure-scale scenes inside an exquisitely detailed outer shell—this set is a beautiful tribute to the Lunar New Year. While rated for ages 9 and up, the final, sophisticated build has the look and feel of an 18+ set.

For more LEGO inspiration, explore our guides to the best overall LEGO sets, the top Marvel LEGO sets, and the most expensive LEGO collections available.