San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade  The San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival and Parade is an annual event in San Francisco. Held for approximately two weeks following the first day of the Chinese New Year, it combines elements of the Chinese Lantern Festival with a typical American parade. First held in 1851, along what are today Grant Avenue and Kearny Street, it is the oldest and largest event of its kind outside of Asia, and the largest Asian cultural event in North America. The parade route begins on Market Street and terminates in Chinatown. Highlights of the parade include floats, lion dancers, elementary school groups in costume, marching bands, stilt walkers, Chinese acrobats, and a Golden Dragon. Observers can expect to hear at least 600,000 firecrackers, and are advised to bring ear plugs. The Golden Dragon is one of the highlights of the parade, considered the “Grand Finale” of the parade. It is made in Foshan, China and is 268 feet long, and takes a team of 100 men and women from the martial arts group White Crane to carry it. The parade is sponsored by Southwest Airlines and is hosted by the San Francisco Chinese Chamber of Commerce. A similar street festival, the Autumn Moon Festival, has been held annually in Chinatown since 1991 to celebrate the Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival, approximately six months after the New Year festival and parade, and is hosted by the Chinatown Merchants Assocation of San Francisco. During the California Gold Rush, many Chinese immigrants came to San Francisco to work in gold mines and on railroads in search of wealth and a better life. The earliest recorded New Year's celebration was "a great feast" on February 21, 1851, and the first dragon dance in San Francisco was held for the New Year in 1860. In the 1860s, the Chinese community wanted to share their Chinese culture with others; they blended their traditions with a favorite American tradition—the parade—and held a parade with flags, banners, lanterns, drums and firecrackers. The "San Francisco Call" noted the holiday in an 1892 article, writing that "no nation [celebrates] the New Year ... with greater rejoicing and feasting than the Chinese", adding that "[m]any white residents who at other times united in saying 'the Chinese must go' find it convenient to invade Chinatown during the holidays and freely partake of Celestial hospitality. Some go further than this and try to carry off everything that is not nailed down." In 1951, a week-long celebration included an anti-Communist parade with the theme "Torches of Liberty", staged by the Chinese Six Companies and attended by a crowd of 10,000.