Mid-Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Festival (simplified Chinese: ä¸ç§è; traditional Chinese: ä¸ç§ç¯; pinyin: zhÅngqiÅ« jié), also known as the Moon Festival or Chinese Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival or Zhongqiu Festival, is a popular lunar harvest festival celebrated by Chinese and Vietnamese people. A description of the festival first appeared in Rites of Zhou, a written collection of rituals of the Western Zhou Dynastyfrom 3,000 years ago. The celebration became popular during the early Tang Dynasty. The festival is held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is in September or early October in the Gregorian calendar, close to the autumnal equinox. The Government of the People’s Republic of Chinalisted the festival as an “intangible cultural heritage” in 2006, and it was made a Chinese public holiday in 2008. It is also a public holiday in Taiwan.
Traditions
The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the others beingSpring Festival and Winter Solstice. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:
§ Eating mooncakes, traditionally consisting primarily of lotus bean paste.
§ Drinking tea.
§ Matchmaking. In some parts of China, dances are held for young men and women to find partners. “One by one, young women are encouraged to throw their handkerchiefs to the crowd. The young man who catches and returns the handkerchief has a chance of romance.”
§ Carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns.[1]
§ Burning incense in reverence to deities including Chang’e
§ Fire Dragon Dances.
§ Solving riddles, usually written on slips of paper and pasted on the lanterns. The riddles are calleddengmi in Mandarin Chinese.
§ Moon rabbit is a traditional icon.