Each year, LEGO introduces new themed sets to celebrate the Lunar New Year, capturing the essence of each zodiac animal in unique ways. In 2021, during the Year of the Ox, LEGO released a Spring Festival set 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 launch three new sets to honor the occasion. The first set features a Lucky Cat. The second, titled "Good Fortune," is a pastiche of Chinese iconography, incorporating elements like a decorative fan, a calligraphy pen and scroll, and golden ingots. The third and most luxurious set, which we have built and photographed for this review, is a detailed replica of a traditional trotting lantern. This set, like all LEGO builds with such intentional focus, offers much more than meets the eye.

We Build The LEGO Trotting Lantern

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Before delving into the construction, let's appreciate the exterior of this model. It's adorned to an extravagant level, with every inch boasting decorative elements—from the red lanterns hanging from the buttresses to the gold detailing on the walls' borders, and the walls themselves, which showcase an open sky and clouds framed by rocks.

Constructing the lantern involves a meticulous process of layering. You start with the core lantern, then add layers of detailed elements, followed by even more intricate details on top. This building technique brings an anticipatory joy, much like the now-retired LEGO Carousel, where the excitement lies in discovering what decorative element comes next.

Traditional trotting lanterns, dating back to the Han Dynasty, were powered by oil lamps, projecting silhouettes of paper cutouts and rotating them via heat-generated propellers. LEGO's designers have ingeniously recreated this effect with a simplified mechanism. An upright rod activates a light brick, illuminating the lantern's base with a yellow glow. This light passes through a clear piece with a black-lined image, projecting it onto the lantern's side. By turning the rod, the image rotates around the lantern.

The packaging suggests the ability to project the image onto a wall or surface, but in practice, the projection is blurry and hard to discern. This feature seems overpromised, especially since traditional lanterns were not designed for this purpose.

The upper tier of the lantern opens to reveal three hidden dioramas: a food stall with dumplings, a decorations stall, and a shadow puppet theater. These surprises are cleverly concealed within the lantern's cylindrical structure, playing on the viewer's perception of depth and space. The set includes five minifigures, one with a snake-costumed head, and accessories like a plate of dumplings, a red envelope, a shadow puppet, and chopsticks.

Deciding whether to purchase this set depends on your priorities. If you're after the lit-up, rotating effect, it may not meet expectations in terms of impressiveness or clarity. However, if you seek an aesthetically stunning piece that hides intricate minifigure-scale scenes within an even more beautifully detailed container, the LEGO Trotting Lantern is a splendid tribute to the Lunar New Year. It's rated for ages 9 and up, though the complexity and final result suggest an 18+ build.

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

The LEGO Trotting Lantern, Set #80116, is available at a retail price of $129.99 and consists of 1295 pieces. It is available now at Amazon and the LEGO Store.