Mooncakes, a Goddess, and a Rebellion: The Mid-Autumn Festival Explained
The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节 Zhōngqiū Jié) is China's second most important holiday after Spring Festival. It falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month — usually September or October — when the moon is at its fullest and brightest. The basic idea is simple: family gathers, eats mooncakes, admires the moon. The stories behind it are anything but simple.
The goddess on the moon
The main legend: a hero named Hou Yi shot down nine of the ten suns that were scorching the earth (this is not the weird part yet). As a reward, he received an elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West. His wife, Chang'e, accidentally drank it — versions differ on whether it was an accident, an act of desperation to prevent a thief from taking it, or a deliberate choice. She immediately floated upward to the moon, where she lives to this day with a jade rabbit that pounds medicine in a mortar.
On Mid-Autumn night, people look at the moon and think about Chang'e. It's bittersweet — she has immortality but eternal separation from her husband. The moon is beautiful and lonely. The festival is about reunion, but the myth is about separation. There's a tension there that Chinese culture is comfortable with in a way Western holidays generally aren't.
Mooncakes are not really about the taste
Mooncakes are dense pastries filled with lotus seed paste, red bean paste, or mixed nuts, often with a salted duck egg yolk in the center representing the full moon. They are extremely rich, extremely caloric, and most foreigners who try them say they're "interesting" — which is polite-speak for "I don't get it."
Mooncakes are not primarily food. They are social currency. During the month before the festival, companies give mooncakes to employees, business partners give them to each other, and families exchange them. The boxes get fancier every year. Some luxury mooncake boxes cost more than $100 and come in packaging more elaborate than most wedding gifts. The mooncakes inside are often not eaten. They circulate in an economy of obligation and goodwill. It's the thought that counts, and the thought is measured in grams of lotus paste.
The rebellion hidden in dessert
During the Yuan Dynasty, when China was under Mongol rule, Han Chinese rebels supposedly used mooncakes to coordinate an uprising. They hid messages inside the cakes with the date of the planned rebellion — the 15th of the 8th month. On the designated night, the uprising began and eventually contributed to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty. The story is probably apocryphal, but it's been told for so long that it has become part of the festival's identity. Mooncakes: delicious pastry and revolutionary tool.
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