Chinese Moon Festival

Chang Er flying to the moon.

CFAS aims to be a resource for readers to go to for interesting tidbits about Chinese culture in general and we think the Moon Festival is a great place to start. This information will be found in our Resources section. The Moon Festival is a significant holiday for Chinese people (and Koreans and Vietnamese as well).  It is also a relatively straightforward holiday, with a few fun traditions, and easy to explain.

By the way, the violin piece “Chang Er flies to the Moon” which CFAS used at the beginning of each act in our China Spectacle: QiXi this past July was actually written about the Moon Festival Legend of Chang Er.

Thanks to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and chineseculture.about.com for the following information:

The Chinese Moon Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival is held every year on the 15th of the 8th lunar month. In 2009 the date is October 3. It is a date that parallels the autumn and spring Equinoxes of the solar calendar, when the moon is supposedly at its fullest and roundest. Chinese culture is deeply attached to traditional festivals and just like Christmas and Thanksgiving in the West, the Moon Festival is one of the two most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, the other being the Chinese New Year, and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the summer harvesting season on this date.

Legend says that Chang Er flew to the moon, where she has lived ever since. You might see her dancing on the moon during the Moon Festival. The Moon Festival is also an occasion for family reunions. When the full moon rises, families get together to watch the full moon, eat moon cakes, and sing moon poems.

Traditionally, on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomeloes together. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:

• Eating moon cakes outside under the moon
• Putting pomelo rinds on one’s head
• Carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers, floating sky lanterns
• Burning incense in reverence to deities including Chang’e
• Planting Mid-Autumn trees
• Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members
• Fire Dragon Dances
• Shops selling mooncakes, before the festival, often display pictures of Chang’e floating to the moon.