BEIJING, Jan 25: Chinese welcomed the arrival of the Year of the Ox with raucous celebrations on Sunday, despite gloom about the economy, setting off firecrackers in the streets and sending fireworks into the sky.

Celebrations were expected to carry on into the early hours of Monday, officially the first day of the Lunar New Year.

Parts of Beijing resembled a war zone with residents braving freezing temperatures to let off brightly coloured fireworks.

Clouds of smoke and a hail of red wrappings from firecrackers covered streets and explosions shook windows.

Firecrackers are believed to scare off evil spirits and entice the god of wealth to people’s doorsteps once New Year’s Day arrives, which falls on Monday this year under the Chinese lunar calendar.

Premier Wen Jiabao, who in previous years has spent the holiday with everyone from AIDS patients to coal miners, visited survivors of last May’s earthquake in Sichuan that killed more than 80,000 people.

“It’s been eight months since the earthquake, and I’m very happy to see how you’ve all been rebuilding your homes,” Wen was paraphrased as telling survivors in Beichuan, the quake’s epicentre, by the China News Service.

President Hu Jintao went to the old revolutionary base of Jinggangshan in central China to visit heroes of the war that brought the Communists to power in 1949, an visited local villages, state television said.

“I’m extremely pleased to see you becoming more prosperous by the day,” Hu told a crowd of cheering villagers.

Earlier, people packed temple fairs and hurried to train and bus stations to get home for the traditional holiday.

TRADITIONAL CULTURE: At Beijing’s Temple of the Earth, people crowded into a fair featuring everything from break-dancing to re-enactments of imperial sacrifices.