Mid-Autumn Festival: moon, mooncakes and legends

The Mid-Autumn Festival, 中秋节 (Zhōngqiū Jié), falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, between September 7 and October 8. The name comes from the calendar: the eighth month is the second of the three months of autumn, "mid-autumn" (中秋), and the festival falls in the middle of that month, at the full moon. The moon is said to be at its roundest and brightest that night.

The word 中秋 is old: it already appears in the Rites of Zhou (周礼), where it simply means the eighth month. The text describes a night rite there to "welcome the cold", to the sound of earthen drums.

The meaning of the festival fits in one word: 团圆 (tuányuán), "to be together". The full moon, round and whole, is its image, which is why people go home that evening for a family dinner. It is also a harvest festival, when the autumn crops come in.

Depending on the region, it has other names: 八月节 ("eighth-month festival"), 八月半 ("mid-eighth month"), 团圆节 ("reunion festival") in Shanghai and Nanjing, or 月饼节 ("mooncake festival") in Guangdong and Hong Kong.

Honouring the moon is a very old rite. According to texts such as the Dadai Liji (大戴礼记), the rulers of antiquity greeted the sun in spring and the moon in autumn; the Tongdian (通典) is more precise: the sun at the spring equinox, the moon at the autumn equinox.

The festival itself is more recent. Texts from the Southern dynasties already speak of admiring the moon, but the Jingchu suishi ji (荆楚岁时记), a record of the year's customs written under the Northern and Southern dynasties, says nothing about Mid-Autumn. The festival probably only spread widely under the Tang (618–907).

Under the Song, it filled the cities. The Dongjing menghua lu (东京梦华录), memories of the Northern Song capital, reports that on Mid-Autumn night "great families decorate their terraces, and the common people fight over the taverns to admire the moon". Other Song texts show people burning incense in their courtyards to greet the moon.

Under the Ming and Qing, Mid-Autumn became one of the main folk festivals, and above all the day of family reunion. In Nanjing, according to a local chronicle of the Zhengde era (正德) of the Ming, admiring the moon as a family was called "celebrating the reunion" (庆团圆), and drinking together seated in a circle was called "the round moon" (圆月).

It is hard to imagine the festival without mooncakes (月饼, yuèbing). Yet their written history is younger than the legends suggest. The word appears under the Southern Song, in Wu Zimu's (吴自牧) Mengliang lu (梦粱录), in the middle of a long list of pastries sold "in every season". The Song texts that describe Mid-Autumn mention fruit and wine, not mooncakes.

The link with the festival is only clearly attested under the Ming. Tian Rucheng (田汝成) writes in his book on West Lake: "The 15th of the eighth month is called Mid-Autumn; people give each other mooncakes, to signify reunion." At the Ming court, Liu Ruoyu (刘若愚) tells how they were sold from the 1st of the eighth month; on the 15th, every household set them out as offerings with fruit, burned incense when the moon rose, then feasted. Leftover mooncakes were kept dry and shared by the family at the end of the year, under the name "reunion cakes" (团圆饼).

Today the best-known kind is the Cantonese mooncake: about ten centimetres across, a thin crust, a thick filling of lotus seed paste, sometimes salted duck egg yolks standing for the full moon. The top bears raised characters, such as "longevity" or "harmony", and the bakery's name. Suzhou-style mooncakes (苏式) are the other great classic, and unbaked "snow skin" mooncakes (冰皮月饼) appeared in the early 1980s. They are mostly bought as gifts, for family as well as business contacts.

The Mid-Autumn moon has its legends. The best known is that of Chang'e (嫦娥). In the Huainanzi (淮南子, 2nd century BCE), Heng'e (姮娥, later renamed Chang'e to avoid an emperor's name) steals the elixir of immortality that her husband, the archer Yi (羿), had obtained from the Queen Mother of the West (西王母), and flees to the Moon. Later versions vary: in some, she swallows the elixir so that one of Yi's disciples cannot seize it.

The Moon is also home to the Jade Rabbit (玉兔), Chang'e's companion, often shown pounding medicine in a mortar, and to Wu Gang (吴刚), condemned to fell an osmanthus tree that keeps growing back.

Another legend is about mooncakes. At the end of the Yuan dynasty, the story goes, the rebels of Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋), the future founder of the Ming, hid messages in mooncakes calling for an uprising on the 15th of the eighth month; the idea is credited to his adviser Liu Bowen (刘伯温). No chronicle records this episode. The story took shape from a forgery, the Jinyu lu (烬余录), first printed in the Guangxu (光绪) reign of the Qing; it then spread with anti-Manchu propaganda, to the point of serving as a slogan for revolutionaries in Shaanxi during the 1911 revolution. It is a legend of recent origin that has become a familiar Mid-Autumn tale.

On the evening of the 15th, families get together for dinner, then admire the moon (赏月), often outdoors, eating mooncakes and seasonal fruit: pomelos (柚子), starfruit, taro, chestnuts, pears or persimmons. In Taiwan, children sometimes wear hats cut from pomelo rind, and since the 1980s families have held outdoor barbecues, a fashion credited to an advertising slogan for a sauce maker: "一家烤肉万家香", "one family barbecues, ten thousand families smell it".

In southern China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, children go out with lanterns; some cities hold large lantern shows, such as the one in Victoria Park in Hong Kong, and riddles are sometimes hung on the lanterns.

Since 2008, Mid-Autumn has been a public holiday in mainland China: a holiday reform that year added three traditional festivals, Qingming, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn. When the festival falls near National Day on October 1, the two holidays merge into an eight-day break. In Hong Kong and Macau, the day after the festival is the day off, because celebrations run late into the night; in Taiwan, it is the day itself.

To wish someone a happy festival, just say 中秋节快乐 ("Happy Mid-Autumn Festival").

Among Mid-Autumn poems, one of the best known is a ci (词) by Su Shi (苏轼) to the tune 水调歌头. Its short preface dates and explains it: "At Mid-Autumn in the bingchen (丙辰) year, I drank happily until dawn, got very drunk and wrote this piece, thinking also of Ziyou." The bingchen year is 1076, and Ziyou (子由) is Su Zhe (苏辙), the poet's younger brother.

The poem opens with a question to the moon: "How long has the bright moon been there? Cup in hand, I ask the blue sky." The poet dreams of riding the wind to the palaces of heaven, but fears the cold of the heights, and dances with his shadow under the moon.

Then he reproaches the moon: why is it always full when people are apart? Before reasoning with himself: people have their sorrows and joys, their partings and reunions; the moon has its clear nights and its clouded ones, its full days and its waning ones; since ancient times, none of this has been perfect.

Hence the closing wish: "May we live long, and, a thousand li apart, share the same lovely moon."