What is Phoenix Chinese Week?
Phoenix Chinese Week is the Valley’s longest-running Lunar New Year festival: two free February days of lion and dragon dances, folk dance and traditional music, tai chi and martial arts, food trucks, cultural exhibits and a Children’s Pavilion, staged by a volunteer nonprofit of the same name in cooperation with the City of Phoenix and the Phoenix Sister Cities committees for Taipei and Chengdu. The 36th festival was February 14–15, 2026, at The Square PHX, the renamed Heritage Square at Sixth and Monroe streets downtown, for the Year of the Horse. The 2027 dates had not been posted as of October 2026; Lunar New Year falls on Saturday, February 6, 2027, opening the Year of the Goat, and the festival has usually landed on a weekend on or just after the new year.
The organization was established in 1989 and held its first festival in 1991 at Patriots’ Park downtown. For nearly two decades after 1999 the festival’s home was the COFCO Chinese Cultural Center on 44th Street, a shopping center under a hand-tiled imperial roof that the Chinese state built in Phoenix and then sold out from under its own community in 2017. The fight over that building, and the festival’s three venues since, is the story behind the lion dance.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is a free weekend morning 25 minutes away or a train ride from a Tempe park-and-ride, in the same February stretch as the Heard Museum’s hoop dance championship and three weeks before Arizona Matsuri.
How to do it
Admission is free. No tickets, no gate. Bring cash and a card for the food trucks and vendors on Sixth Street and for the merchandise booths, which sell red envelopes, lanterns, calligraphy and the small lucky objects of the new year.
Confirm the venue the week before. The festival was at Steele Indian School Park in 2023 and 2025 and moved to Heritage Square in 2026; the organizer’s site and social accounts are the only reliable sources, and the third-party calendars lag a year. At Heritage Square the Rosson House and the museum buildings stay open during the festival, which is worth the detour between stage sets.
Getting there. From Scottsdale, allow 25 minutes down the Loop 202 to the Seventh Street exit, or ride the light rail from the Sycamore or Dorsey/Apache park-and-ride to 3rd St/Washington or 12th St/Washington, each a few blocks from Heritage Square; a day pass is $4. Downtown garages run $10 to $20 on a weekend, and the Heritage garage at Fifth and Monroe is the closest.
When to arrive. Saturday opens at 9 a.m. (Sunday at 10) and the lion dance that opens the stage is the best ten minutes of the weekend: the drums, the cymbals, the lettuce dangled from a pole and shredded over the crowd for luck. Performances are continuous until 5, rotating dragon dance teams, folk dancers in the costumes of a dozen provinces, guzheng players and the Valley’s kung fu and tai chi schools. Sunday afternoon is the quietest window for the exhibits.
With children. The Children’s Pavilion runs the chopstick challenge, mahjong and abacus tables, Chinese yo-yo, paper crafts and a costumed photo booth, and a volunteer will write a child’s name in characters to take home. Budget half an hour; it is the part they will remember.
Eat early. The food trucks and vendors sell dumplings, wok-fired noodles, grilled skewers, boba and the dishes of whichever Valley restaurants have signed on that year; the lines double between noon and 1. Afterward, the Burton Barr Central Library is a mile north on Central for the rest of a Phoenix afternoon.
From Patriots’ Park to the Cultural Center
Phoenix Chinese Week was founded, as its volunteers told Phoenix New Times in 2002, to keep tradition alive among younger Chinese generations in a city whose two historic Chinatowns had been displaced a century earlier. The first festival in 1991 was a downtown affair at Patriots’ Park. Then came the Chinese Cultural Center. BNU Corp., a subsidiary of the Chinese state food conglomerate COFCO, announced it in 1996 as a for-profit shopping center on 26 acres near Sky Harbor, marketed to Phoenix as a cultural center for its Chinese community. About 30 master craftsmen hand-laid roughly a million green and gold roof tiles, the gardens covered 35,000 square feet with pagodas and a replica of the Lingxing Gate, and Ambassador Li Zhaoxing and Senator Jon Kyl opened it in December 1998. The 1999 Chinese Week was held there, and for most of the next two decades the Culture and Cuisine Festival, as the week’s main event was then called, filled its courtyards with dragon dancers, martial artists and a puppet show.
The 2017 sale and what was lost
The center never worked as a business. Occupancy was 26 percent by 2017 and only 6 percent of the tenants were Chinese-related. In June 2017 COFCO sold it for $10.5 million to True North, a Scottsdale firm that planned to make it a headquarters and remove the roof and the Chinese elements. The response was the largest Chinese American civic mobilization Phoenix had seen: a petition with 16,000 signatures by a September council meeting, weekly protests, a coalition of nearly 20 organizations under the Chinese United Association of Greater Phoenix, and lawsuits that numbered about ten by September 2018, including a federal religious-discrimination suit after the gardens, used by Taoist and Buddhist worshippers, were fenced off. A Maricopa County judge temporarily blocked removal of the roof and statues in the fall of 2017; the order was lifted in late November. The city said it could not designate a 19-year-old building historic. In 2018 the community offered $18 million to buy it back and was told it was not for sale. The roof tiles, the owner said, were too deteriorated to save; the gardens were leveled; about two dozen stone guardian figures went into storage. The property became the Outlier Center. The Valley’s Chinese commercial life regrouped along Dobson Road in Mesa, with more than 70 businesses by 2022, and the festival went looking for a park.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
The festival’s wandering since, Steele Indian School Park from 2023 under president Eva Li, with West Point High School’s dragon team practicing twice a week, and Heritage Square in 2026, is the visible cost of losing a building, and the reason a visitor should check the venue each January. It is still free, still volunteer-run, and still the Valley’s loudest lion dance. It pairs naturally with the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest at the Heard the same month, and with Arizona Matsuri at the end of February and the Persian New Year Festival in Scottsdale in March, the Valley’s run of immigrant new-year festivals that cost nothing and feed you well. Twenty-five minutes, a $4 train pass, and a morning of drums.