The brightest full moon
The Mid-Autumn FESTIVAL falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, usually in September or early October, when the FULL MOON is said to be at its brightest and ROUND. It is a time of REUNION: families GATHER, often outdoors, to share food, admire the MOONLIGHT and give thanks for the HARVEST. The round moon stands for a family that is whole and together. It is sometimes simply called the Moon Festival, and since 2008 it has been a public holiday in mainland China.
It is celebrated across East Asia. In Korea, Chuseok is one of the biggest holidays of the year, when families travel home, honour their ancestors and eat half-moon-shaped rice cakes called songpyeon. In Japan, people hold moon-viewing parties called tsukimi, and in Vietnam the festival, Tết Trung Thu, is especially for children, who parade with star-shaped lanterns.
The goddess who lives on the Moon
The best-known LEGEND tells of a time when ten suns rose at once and scorched the earth. A great archer called Hou Yi shot down nine of them and was rewarded with a potion that would make him immortal. In one version, his wife Chang'e drank it to keep it from a thief, and she floated up to the Moon, where she lives still as a GODDESS with a white RABBIT pounding medicine with a pestle. Families put out fruit and cakes for her, and children look for the rabbit in the dark patches on the Moon.
China named its lunar exploration programme after her. Its Chang'e spacecraft have landed on the Moon several times, including the first landing on the far side in 2019, and its lunar rovers are called Yutu, meaning jade rabbit. Our Chinese mythology page covers the other gods.
Moon cakes
A MOON CAKE is a small, round, heavy pastry, often filled with sweet LOTUS seed paste, and sometimes with a salted duck egg yolk hidden in the middle to stand for the moon. The tops are pressed with patterns and Chinese characters. A popular legend says that in the 1300s, rebels against the Mongol rulers of China hid secret messages inside moon cakes to plan their uprising, though historians doubt the story.
Moon cakes are rich, so they are usually cut into small wedges and shared with TEA, alongside a juicy POMELO and other autumn fruits. Friends and businesses give boxes of them as gifts, and fancy modern versions come filled with ice cream, chocolate or durian. In 2016 two Chinese astronauts on board the Tiangong-2 space laboratory ate moon cakes in orbit for the festival.
Lanterns and dragons
Children carry paper LANTERN shapes of rabbits, fish and stars that GLOW in the dark, and in some places lanterns are floated on rivers or released into the sky. In Hong Kong's Tai Hang district, a fire DRAGON sixty-seven metres long, stuck with thousands of burning incense sticks, dances through the streets for three nights, a custom said to date back to the 1880s. For many families in CHINA and beyond, the AUTUMN evening, the FAMILY and something SWEET are the whole point.