Chinapedia | Different Mid-Autumn Festival traditions in China
The Mid-Autumn Festival is a family reunion time, which falls on the 15th day of the eighth month in the lunar calendar. It is celebrated all over China, with different celebration styles depending on the location.
Mooncakes
Mooncakes are definitely an indispensable part of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Despite the different styles of mooncakes, people around China enjoy mooncakes during the festival.
- 🥮There are many variations in the ingredients used for fillings of Cantonese-style mooncakes, but the featured fillings are double yolk (salted egg yolk) and lotus seed paste as fillings.
- 🥮The Suzhou-style mooncakes feature both sweet and savory types, and are known for their layers of flaky dough. The latter are usually filled with pork mince.
- 🥮The Yunnan-style mooncakes also have both sweet and savory types. The sweet mooncakes are filled with edible roses while the savory mooncakes are filled with mushrooms and ham.
- 🥮The Shanxi-style mooncakes are hollow. Instead of tender pastry skin with dense fillings, the Shanxi-style mooncakes are crispy and filled with brown sugar and nuts.
- 🥮The famous lava custard mooncakes and the snow skin mooncakes originate from Hong Kong. They are the featured mooncakes of Hong Kong-style mooncakes.
- 🥮Minnan-style mooncakes are known for their giant size. It originates from the “scholar cakes”, which were distributed to those who sat for the imperial examinations in ancient China.
- 🥮Hainan-style mooncakes have a flaky crust and usually use lotus paste, coconut paste, red bean paste, or mixed nuts as fillings.
- 🥮Each year, many creative mooncakes are unique in their look or flavor. For example, this year, there's the Black Myth: Wukong-style mooncakes, cilantro-flavor mooncakes, crayfish flavor mooncakes, and so on
Tu'er Ye
Tu'er Ye, also known as the Rabbit God, is a deity of Chinese folk in Beijing. The legend goes that there was an epidemic in North China long ago, so the Moon Goddess sent her rabbit to treat the disease. People were thankful to the Rabbit God and believed that Tu'er Ye could bring luck to people. People worship Tu’er Ye as a traditional custom of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Burning tower
In some places of Southern China, there's a unique Mid-Autumn Festival tradition called "Burning Tower". Recognized as a National Intangible Cultural Heritage, villagers gather to build and set fire to a 2-3 meter tall tower made of rubble, bricks and tiles, and fill the insides with straws, firewood and tree leaves. As the flames rise, they celebrate the harvest and offer wishes for a bright and prosperous future.
Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance
The Hong Kong Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance was first performed during the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1880. The legend goes that a plague prevailed in the Tai Hang village. An elder villager said that in his dream, the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, told him that there was a way to end the plague by performing a fire dragon dance around the village. The villagers did so, and miraculously, the plague disappeared. Therefore, they kept performing the Fire Dragon Dance every year, and it became a unique Mid-Autumn Festival tradition.
(English editor: Ella Qu)
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