Mid-Autumn Festival

The eighth full moon on the Chinese calendar is the traditional “Mid-Autumn Festival,” because it is the 15^th day of the eighth month, which is right at the middle of autumn (on Chinese calendar, the 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th months are autumn). Mid-Autumn Festival is a very important festival, only next to the Chinese New Year.

At night on the Mid-Autumn Festival, the moon is a full circle, which implies “perfection,” “harmony,” “together” in Chinese culture. Because of that, Mid-Autumn Festival is the day for people to remember their family members and friends who are far away from home, and for those away from home to remember their family, friends, and hometown.

Numerous poems were written for this beautiful, harmonic, sometimes slightly sad with missing family and friends who cannot be together. Let me present just a couple of the most famous of them (my own translation, might not be “poem”-like but just try to convey some sense of it):

举头望明月

低头思故乡

Raising my head I gaze

The cool beauty’s bright face,

Lowering my head I wonder

What hometown is like today.  

(By LI Bai [or LI Bo], famous poet of Tang dynasty, 701-762)

露从今夜白

月是故乡明

The dew is turning frost beginning from tonight,

While hometown’s moon is much more bright.

(By DU Fu, famous poet of Tang dynasty, 712-770)

Mid-Autumn Festival is also a day of worship: worshipping and enjoying the beautiful moon. Many rituals of worship gradually turned to entertainment activities. People would have moon cakes on this day, and in southern Fujian (Fukien) province and in Taiwan province which is just 150 miles from Fujian, people also get together and play a game with six dice to win moon cakes of different size and quality, symbolizing winning the various levels in the ancient Chinese civil exam. Men of letters would gather on this day to write poems on the beauty of the moon, the missing and longing of their friends and family members who are traveling or working far away, and the feelings of the season.