Things To Know About The Mid Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival, is China's second-largest festival after the Chinese New Year, with a 3,000-year history of rulers worshipping the moon for plentiful harvests.
The event occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month in the Chinese lunisolar calendar, which corresponds to late September to early October in the Gregorian calendar. The Chinese believe that the moon is at its brightest and largest size on this day, which also happens to be harvest time in the middle of Autumn.
Lanterns of various sizes and shapes are carried and displayed as symbolic beacons of prosperity and good fortune. Traditionally, mooncakes, a rich pastry filled with sweet bean or lotus seed paste, are served at this event.
Following a successful rice and wheat harvest, the celebration served as an opportunity to honour the moon with food offerings. Eating mooncakes and gazing at the moon, a symbol of peace and unity, is a tradition that is still practised for outdoor gatherings of friends and families today. It is customary for government offices, banks, and schools to close for an extra day during the year of a solar eclipse in order to enjoy the extended celestial celebration.
The holiday season would be incomplete without the custom of carrying brightly coloured lanterns. The availability of mass-produced plastic lanterns featuring internationally recognised characters such as Pokémon's Pikachu, Disney characters, Naruto, Angry Birds, Ben 10, Doraemon, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Hello Kitty has resulted in a decline in handcrafted lantern production in recent years.
Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the festival's most enduring traditions. Mooncakes are another popular Mid-Autumn Festival food. In Chinese tradition, a circular shape represents completion and reunion. Sharing and eating round mooncakes with family members during the festival week symbolises the completeness and unity of families.
Mooncakes are traditionally made in several parts of China on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. The senior household member divided mooncakes into pieces and distributed them to family members, symbolising a family reunion. In modern times, the traditional practise of making mooncakes at home has given way to the more popular practise of giving mooncakes to family members, but the concept of familial togetherness has remained unchanged.
Despite the fact that the majority of mooncakes are only a few centimetres in diameter, imperial chefs crushed designs of Chang'e, cassia trees, and the Moon-Palace onto the surface of mooncakes. The number thirteen represents the thirteen months of a full Chinese lunar year, and one custom involves stacking thirteen mooncakes on top of one another to resemble a pagoda. The spectacle of massive mooncake production is still performed in modern China.
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