Did you clean your house from top to bottom and pay off all debts before the end of last week? If you did, you've made a good start to welcoming in the Chinese lunar new year, which in 2014 is the Year of the Wooden Horse. Chinese New Year celebrations have become a major event in the city's calendar. The City of Sydney's Chinese New Year Festival is now the largest celebration of the Lunar New Year outside Asia. Chinese New Year hasn't always held the significance for the wider population that it has today. The celebration of traditional festivals in local communities were regarded with suspicion and prejudice by many non-Chinese Australians. On Saturday 7 February 1880, Sydney's Evening News, reported: "The Chinese new year will commence on Tuesday next. The Celestials are making preparations to celebrate the suspicious event with the barbaric splendour the subjects of the Children of the Sun are so fond of displaying" In April 1881, when a higher than usual number of Chinese arrivals in Sydney generated some anti-immigration sentiment, officials were quick to point out that this was just the usual upsurge of residents returning from Chinese New Year celebrations in China and South East Asia.

Celebrations often made it into mainstream press. The opening of the Chinese temples in Alexandria and Glebe were reported and older residents in Botony recalled lion dances up Botany Road until the 1930s.

The refurbishment of Chinatown as a tourist destination in the 1980s made the Chinese New Year a Sydney-wide event with festivities spreading to suburbs including Cabramatta, Parramatta and Hurstville. You can read Terri McCormack's article on Chinese New Year here in the Dictionary. Next week the Dictionary welcomes historian Nicole Cama to the chair, joining Tim for a slice of Sydney history on Breakfast with Tim Higgins on 2SER. Don't forget to tune in to 107.9 at 8:20am.