🏮 Red Paper Lantern

Unicode lists 🏮 Red Paper Lantern among the light and video equipment in the Objects group. It usually appears in messages about bar, lantern, light and paper. Further official keywords are red and restaurant.

🏮 fits messaging apps, social networks and anywhere a short visual cue helps. On SmileyZone it is filed under Household Items. It joined the standard with Emoji 0.6 in 2010, so support on current devices is reliable. Its code point is U+1F3EE.

• A single 🏮 is often enough to set the tone.
• Fits messages about bar, lantern, light and paper.
• Often seen near 🔦 Flashlight, 🪔 Diya Lamp and 💡 Light Bulb.

The red paper lantern, chōchin in Japanese, hangs outside izakaya and ramen shops and simply signals that the place is open. It often carries the name of the establishment or the character for sake. In China, red lanterns belong to Spring Festival and to the Lantern Festival that closes the New Year period.

In the West the emoji is often used as a general marker for “Asian” – a shorthand that folds two rather different traditions into one.

• 🏮📼 – Red Paper Lantern and Videocassette
• 🏮🔦 – Red Paper Lantern with Flashlight
• 🏮📺 – Red Paper Lantern plus Television
• 🏮🔍 – Red Paper Lantern and Magnifying Glass Tilted Left
• 🏮🎬 – Red Paper Lantern with Clapper Board
• 🏮🪔 – Red Paper Lantern plus Diya Lamp
• 🏮📸 – Red Paper Lantern and Camera with Flash
• 🏮📹 – Red Paper Lantern with Video Camera

Easy to mix up with 🔦 Flashlight, 🪔 Diya Lamp or 💡 Light Bulb. They sit in the same Unicode subgroup and look similar at small sizes, so it is worth checking the name before sending.