LEGO Trotting Lantern: Celebrating 2025 Lunar New Year

Each year, LEGO celebrates the Lunar New Year with special themed sets that capture the essence of the occasion. In 2021, during the Year of the Ox, LEGO introduced the Spring Festival set, beautifully set in a traditional garden. Fast forward to 2024, the Year of the Dragon, and LEGO unveiled the Auspicious Dragon set, designed to resemble a bronze statue on a stand.

LEGO Spring Festival Trotting Lantern

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$129.95 at Amazon
$129.99 at LEGO Store

As we approach 2025, the Year of the Snake, LEGO is set to release three unique sets to commemorate this event. The first set features a Lucky Cat. The second, titled Good Fortune, is a pastiche of Chinese iconography including a decorative fan, a calligraphy pen and scroll, and golden ingots. The third and most lavish set, which we had the pleasure of building and photographing for this review, is the LEGO Spring Festival Trotting Lantern, a stunning replica of a traditional trotting lantern. This set, like many LEGO creations with a focused theme, reveals more intricacies upon closer inspection.

We Build The LEGO Trotting Lantern

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Before diving into the build, it's essential to appreciate the exterior of the LEGO Trotting Lantern. The attention to detail is nothing short of extravagant, with every surface adorned with decorative elements. From the hanging red lanterns on the buttresses to the gold detailing along the walls' borders, and the walls themselves depicting an open sky and clouds framed by rocks, the craftsmanship is impeccable.

Constructing the lantern involves a delightful process of layering. You start by building the core lantern, followed by adding detailed overlays, and finally, even more intricate details on top. This methodical approach builds anticipation, much like the now-retired LEGO Carousel, which also offered a similar sense of delight in discovering what decorative element would come next.

Traditional trotting lanterns, originating from the Han Dynasty, were powered by oil lamps, projecting silhouettes of paper cutouts while the heat from the lamps rotated the silhouettes via propellers. LEGO ingeniously replicates this effect with a mechanism featuring an upright rod that activates a light brick, causing the bottom of the lantern to glow. The light shines through a clear piece with a black-lined image, projecting and rotating the image around the lantern as you turn the rod.

The packaging suggests you can project the image onto a wall or other surfaces, but in my experience, the projection was blurry and difficult to discern. This feature seems overstated, especially since the original trotting lantern wasn't designed for such projection.

The upper tier of the lantern holds a delightful surprise: it opens to reveal three hidden dioramas—a food stall serving dumplings, a decorations stall, and a shadow puppet theater. These hidden scenes, tucked away like a Polly Pocket inside the lantern's cylinder, showcase a clever use of space and depth perception. The set includes five minifigures, one with a snake costume on its head, along with accessories such as a plate of dumplings, a red envelope, a shadow puppet, and chopsticks.

The decision to purchase the LEGO Trotting Lantern might hinge on what you're looking for. If it's the mechanical effect of the lit-up, rotating image, it may not meet expectations due to its limited clarity and impact. However, if you're seeking an aesthetically stunning set that hides impressive minifigure-scale scenery within a beautifully detailed container, this set is a perfect homage to the Lunar New Year. It's rated for ages 9 and up, but the final result feels more akin to an 18+ build.

For more recommendations, explore our selections of the best LEGO sets overall, the top Marvel LEGO sets, and the most luxurious LEGO sets available.

The LEGO Trotting Lantern, set number 80116, retails for $129.99 and comprises 1295 pieces. You can find it available now at Amazon and the LEGO Store.