Six Things You Didn't Know About Mid-Autumn Festival

There’s Qixi on the 14th of August, but Mid-Autumn Festival was once the celebratory day of love in China. According to Chinese mythology, it was the Chinese god of marriage and love, Yue Lao, whose name means “old man under the moon”, who oversaw romance among ordinary people, binding couples together with a magic red string.

 

As Mid-Autumn Festival is a celebration of the moon, and therefore also Yue Lao, it was originally an occasion to pray for love and happy marriages.

Legend has it that in 1368, after 88 years of Mongol rule over the Han Chinese, Zhu Yuanzhang, the man who would one day become the first emperor of China’s Ming Dynasty, decided to lead an uprising against the Mongol rulers, with the help of his friend Liu Bowen, a poet, philosopher, and remarkable strategist.

The Mid-Autumn Festival was approaching — a time when every family would come together and eat mooncakes — and Liu devised a plan to have millions of mooncakes planted with pieces of paper carrying a secret message telling people to join the fight. And so they did, on the night of the Moon Festival, and the Chinese were liberated.

Many countries around the world celebrate the full moon that occurs closest to the autumnal equinox. In Asia, Mid-Autumn Festival is also observed in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines — all of which have their own unique ways to mark the event.

In South Korea, the celebration lasts three days, and people travel far and wide to reunite with relatives. In Singapore, lantern displays light up the streets and dragon dances keep everyone entertained, while in Sri Lanka, where people pay homage to the full moon every month, the mid-autumn day is a national holiday, and devotees flock to temples for sermons or moon worship.

Back in the day, mooncakes used to be called hu cakes (anything that originated from the west of China was prefixed with the word hu). The story goes that the Tang dynasty emperor Xuanzong didn’t think much of the name, and was thinking of ideas for new names with his favorite concubine, the legendary beauty Yang Guifei, when she saw the full moon and suggested the name “mooncake” (yue cake) The name stuck, and hu cakes became the now world-famous mooncakes.

Over the centuries, different regions in China have developed mooncake flavors and styles for local tastes. In Beijing, for example, the pastries are known for their crispy brown shell. Guangzhou-style mooncakes have a thick, soft shell and various filling options, while Taiwanese mooncakes are often filled with sweet potato. Suzhou prefers a crust made of layers of thin, pale pastry, and Hong Kong is partial to cakes with double egg yolks and lotus seed paste fillings.

As it falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, Mid-Autumn is also sometimes called August Festival or simply Autumn Festival. Other names include Moon Festival and Reunion Festival, since the full moon is a symbol of familial togetherness. Because mooncakes are eaten during this time, another popular appellation is Mooncake Festival.

And that’s not all: in Vietnam, it’s called Children’s Festival, and little ones carry lanterns as they watch lion dances and feast on mooncakes.