Mid-Autumn Festival in and outside of China

While people across China will be taking the week off for the National Day holidays starting on October 1, they will also be celebrating another major holiday on Wednesday: the Mid-Autumn Festival. Like many of China's traditional festivals, the Mid-Autumn Festival can be dated back hundreds of years and carries with it a number of legends.

Mooncakes Photo: IC

Origins

Now a national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in China, the festival, which lands on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese calendar, can be traced back to at least the Zhou Dynasty (1046-BC256). The mention of "mid-autumn" as a special time was first written in The Rites of Zhou, a work on bureaucracy and organizational theory written during the Zhou Dynasty.

There are also records describing how ancient Chinese kings worshiped the sun in the spring time and the moon in the autumn in The Book of Rites, a collection of texts describing Zhou Dynasty social forms, administration structure and ceremonial rites. However, Chinese scholars tend to believe that the true roots of the festival lie with the common people, who started the festival as a way to celebrate the autumn harvest.

While the festival's origins can be traced to Zhou times and even earlier, the first known appearance of the name Zhongqiujie, or "Mid-Autumn Festival," occurred during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Ma Yunchao, a historian at Nanjing University, told the Global Times.

"The earliest related record is in a chronicle by the Japanese monk Ennin, who traveled to China during the Tang Dynasty in the mid-9th century," Ma said.

"He recorded many local customs on his travels, which include the mention of a few Silla people singing, dancing, and eating a kind of wheat-based food on the 15th day of the 8th month in Dengzhou, which was in what is now the eastern part of Shandong Province.

"The festival was meant to celebrate victory in a war fought by Silla, [one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea], according to what a local Chinese monk told Ennin," he explained.

"The History of the Northern Dynasties, which was written by the Tang government, also recorded that Silla 'celebrates on 15th of the 8th month,'" Ma noted.

"So it is very possible that the Mid-Autumn Festival of China came from ancient Korea."

"Though some have objected to this point of view, saying that the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is different from that described in these ancient books, I prefer to see it as a reflection of the cultural exchanges that were taking place in East Asia during the mid-Tang Dynasty," Ma explained.

Foods and legends

Mooncake, a type of pastry with different fillings, is the most representative food of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Just like the full moon that rises on the night of the festival, mooncakes are round in shape. In addition to representing the full moon, the word "circle" in Chinese also means "complete" and "together." As such, the pastry symbolizes the idea of a family coming together to celebrate the holiday.

Over the centuries, mooncakes have diverged and changed according to local tastes in different parts of China. For example, Beijing-style mooncakes tend to be more crispy than sticky, use nut-based fillings and are often sweet. White mooncakes and red mooncakes are the most often seen colors. According to legend, one time when Beijing was dealing with a plague, the fairy of the moon, Chang'e, sent her pet rabbit down to cure the disease using two medicines - one white, the other red.

By comparison, Suzhou-style mooncakes can be sweet or salty, with the latter type filled with salty pork mince meat and often served hot. Cantonese-style mooncakes have a large variety of fillings, which include lotus seed paste, ham, chicken, roast pork and egg yolk.

Today's mooncakes have also included some Western flavors, such as chocolate, cheese and ice cream.

The moon festival abroad

Many countries in Asia also celebrate their own versions of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

As mentioned before, the festival is tightly tied to Korean culture. However, Koreans have their own unique name for the festival - Chuseok (Autumn eve). Also a harvest celebration and viewed as a time for family reunions, traditional festival food includes songpyeon (a stuffed rice cake), hangwa (an artistic food decorated with natural colors and made with rice flour, honey, fruit and roots, shaped in patterns and decorated with colors) and Baekseju, a local liquor.

In Japan, the festival is called Tsukimi or Otsukimi, which means moon-viewing. Tsukimi dango (white rice dumplings), taro, edamame and chestnuts are festival foods meant to be snacked on as well as used as offerings to the moon.

Named Tet Trung Thu in Vietnamese, the Mid-Autumn Festival is also regarded as a festival for children, because Vietnamese believe the innocence and purity of children give them a close connection to the sacred. Different from other nations, the Lion Dance is a unique part of the Vietnamese festival meant to attract good fortune.

(GLOBAL TIMES)