A Dance with Dragons – Hanfu in Fantasy Festival

Hello hanfu lovers!

Remember last year where I went to a fantasy festival dressed in Han dynasty hanfu? Of course you don’t, here is the article.

Hanfu With a Splash of Cider

I did it again this year. With another hanfu from another dynasty.

So every year there is this huge festival in the North of France on the 3rd weekend of September, named “Cidre et Dragon” (cider and dragon). It’s in a little town on the beach, it attracts tens of thousands of visitors, merchants, and fantasy authors… and has the highest rate of costumed visitors that I know of.

I’ve been going for 12 years now, but only recently began going in Hanfu.

This is how we went last year:

This year I chose a Ming dynasty style costume I made. I added a Yunjian I bought, because I just can’t afford the time to do the embroideries. I also wore a wig because i cut my hair shorter this year. And here I am:

You might be wondering what was that thing lying at my feet.

Well, yeah, that’s a dragon. What the internet calls a “fitness dragon”. I saw it by chance on a online shop and googled a few videos of it. There are surprisingly little documentation on the techniques and training for fitness dragon wielding, but I gathered the gist, and I thought, yeah, I could learn to do that!

Here is how it looks in action:

I’m pretty proud of me. I’ll post videos in the groups maybe.

The second day I felt like wearing an easier costume, so I took out the “Dragon Guard” Yisan I got from our point shop. And I danced some more with my dragon.

There you go guys. Some highlights of my dragon adventure. I had a lot of people taking my picture and a lot of them knew about hanfu. So I hope some day I will come across someone else wearing it and have a group shot.

Next year I’m thinking about buying another dragon of a different color and maybe with LED lights. That would be so cool. I’ll keep you posted.