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Chinese people across the country and overseas celebrated in various ways the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival on Thursday.
Decorative lanterns were lit up in Singapore's Chinatown, which has started month-long celebrations for the festival since early September.
The dazzling lantern display tells the origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival, and this year marks the first time that Chinatown was lit up with LED lanterns, allowing for a more environmentally friendly celebration.
In Nakhon Sawan Province in Thailand, people celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival by performing a dragon dance.
Nakhon Sawan, some 200 km north of the capital Bangkok, is a province famous for its dragon dance culture and home to many people of Chinese descent. The local dragon team decorated their dragons with colored lights, which allowed for a brilliant show inside a local shrine.
"We added fashionable lights here to combine with the traditional rituals, which make this year's celebration quite special," Said Thanakom Jongjira, governor of Nakhon Sawan.
Celebrations were also held in the United States. In San Francisco's Chinatown, a two-day celebration event was organized to hail the festival.
The Art Institute of Chicago raked through more than 3,500 pieces of art from China and will exhibit a "Chang E" painting finished in the late Yuan Dynasty or early Ming Dynasty (AD 1350-1400). It is believed that the Mid-Autumn Festival, or a harvest festival celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, is inspired by the legend of Chang E, the Chinese goddess of the Moon.
The painting was originally painted on a bamboo or wood frame and functioned as a fan.
Some other rare Chinese artworks fresh from the museum's collections will also be displayed during the Mid-Autumn Festival celebration period from Sept. 10 to 18.
Meanwhile, the mooncake, a traditional pastry special regarded as an indispensable delicacy during the festival, has flown off the shelves in many countries.
In Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, a variety of mooncakes were on sale in many shops and supermarkets and drew crowds of customers.
Mom The, marketing executive of the locally well-known Apsara Bakery, said the Mid-Autumn Festival was the best-selling time of the year.
"Since Monday this week, many Cambodians of Chinese descent and Chinese people have flocked to shops to buy moon cakes," he told Xinhua. "They believe that their worship to the moon will bring them fortune and happiness."
This year, the mooncake also hit the shelves in many chain supermarkets in Los Angeles for the first time.
"In recent days, I found that many American supermarkets, like Costco and Vons began selling Chinese mooncakes as well," said Annie Zhang, an Chinese immigrant who has lived in LA County for seven years.
Upon seeing mooncakes at a local supermarket, Zhang said it made her " feel very warm."
Costco, the largest membership-only warehouse club in the United States,began selling mooncakes a month ago. "We have to refill the shelves everyday here," a Costco staff said.
Compared with Asian food retailers, American supermarkets only have limited flavors of mooncakes. Nevertheless, costumers said they tasted very authentic and the prices were acceptable.
(APD)
