International Kite Festival

The International Kite Festival takes place each year around April 20th and draws competitors and enthusiasts from across the world to a dedicated flying field east of the city. The event is one of the world's largest kite-specific gatherings, combining competition in various categories (altitude, duration, artistic design, team formations) with commercial exhibition and cultural performances.

The scale of the event means the flying field is genuinely impressive: hundreds of kites of every conceivable type in the air simultaneously, from traditional Chinese forms to sophisticated aerobatic fighter kites. If your timing allows, it is one of the more visually unusual experiences available anywhere in Shandong. Outside the festival window, the flying field is used by local kite clubs most weekends with good weather.

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A story
The Weifang International Kite Festival began in 1984 and was among the earliest international events held in China after the reform era. In its early years, the foreign participants — kite enthusiasts from the United States, Europe, and Japan — were a novelty to local crowds, and photographs from the first festivals show large numbers of Weifang residents watching the foreigners as intently as the kites.