Get ready for Beijing to ring in the Year of the Ox with a bang - hundreds of thousands of them. The amazing fireworks display will be jointly hosted by nearly all of the greater city's 18 million residents, who have stayed home and not visited their relatives across the nation.

It will crescendo at midnight on Sunday or Chuxi (Chinese Lunar New Year's Eve) and continue until Feb 9 within nearly every inch bounded by the Fifth Ring Road, apart from major sites like Tiananmen Square, the Asian Games Village and the Olympic Green.

"People set them off in the streets, in the gardens - you can see them just about everywhere," says Panda Fireworks vendor Fan Yajun, one of 2,000 certified sellers fireworks Beijing.

Fan says business has been booming at her stand with up to 50,000 sales a day since it opened on Jan 19 on the corner of Huixin Dongjie and Beitucheng Donglu in north Beijing. It is one of the company's 193 outlets in Chaoyang district.

"Olympic fireworks are the most popular this year, because they're new but won't be available next year," she says, adding that firecrackers also remain a classic staple.

The priciest set Panda offers is a 790-yuan cluster of rockets that explode in "footstep" shapes reminiscent of the Games' Opening Ceremony. It's expensive, but Fan assures shoppers they'll get a lot of bang for their buck, with 190 blasts launched 30 m into the air.

The footsteps have several equivalents, including "smiley faces" and "triple-eights", which also discharge in shapes corresponding to their names. However, the triple-eights only detonate 96 times.

A more affordable Olympic option, Fan says, is the 280-yuan "Bird's Nest" (pictured top), which is shaped like the iconic venue, complete with a green athletics field. It sends up a spray of fountains that also resemble a small-scale reenactment of the Opening Ceremony.

Of course, no Spring Festival celebration is complete without firecrackers.