Mid-Autumn Festival Handbook

Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as Moon Festival, Moonlight Festival, Moon Festival, Autumn Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Moon Worshipping Festival, Moon Maiden Festival, Moon Festival, Reunion Festival, etc., is a traditional Chinese folk festival. The Mid-Autumn Festival originates from the worship of heavenly phenomena and evolved from the moon festival on the eve of autumn in the ancient times. Since ancient times, the Mid-Autumn Festival has been characterized by folk customs such as sacrificing to the moon, enjoying the moon, eating mooncakes, watching lanterns, enjoying osmanthus flowers, drinking osmanthus wine, etc., which have been passed down to the present day and are still enduring.

Ancient Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival banquets were the most refined and elegant at the court. Such as the Ming Dynasty court fashionable to eat crabs. Crab steamed in a bag, people sitting around to taste, accompanied by wine and vinegar. After eating, drink Su Ye soup, and wash their hands with. Banquet table area around, full of flowers, pomegranates and other seasonal food, the performance of the Mid-Autumn Festival mythological opera. Qing Palace in a courtyard to the east to put a screen, screen on both sides of the shelves of the cockles of the flowers, beans technology, taro, peanuts, radish, fresh lotus root. Screen set up a table in front of the Eight Immortals, on the top of a large moon cake, surrounded by pastries and fruits. Offerings completed, according to the Royal population will be cut into several pieces of moon cake, each person symbolically taste a mouthful, called "eating reunion cake". Qing dynasty moon cake of the big, unimaginable. Like the last emperor rewarded the minister in charge of internal affairs of a moon cake, is "diameter about two feet Xu, weighing about twenty pounds.

Listening to incense is an ancient Mid-Autumn custom passed down in Taiwan. In ancient times, young girls who wanted to get a good match first burned incense in front of the gods at home, told their hearts, and prayed to the gods to indicate the direction of listening to the incense, and then according to the direction of the instructions on the road, inadvertently or overheard the first sentence, and kept it in mind, and then went home to throw wild rice, to judge the interpretation of the fortunes and misfortunes of the things that were being divined. For example, if you hear the words "eat sweet cake" or "blossom" or "full moon", it means good omen and a happy event is near.

Worshiping Ancestors

The Mid-Autumn Festival custom in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong. In the afternoon of the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, each family sets up an altar in the hall, puts a plaque of the ancestor god, and offers various kinds of offerings. After the festival, the offerings are cooked one by one and the family eats a sumptuous dinner together.

Fire Dragon Dance

The Fire Dragon Dance is the most traditional feature of the Mid-Autumn Festival in Hong Kong. Starting from the night of the 14th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, a grand fire dragon dance is held for three nights in a row in the Tai Hang area of Causeway Bay. This fire dragon is more than 70 meters long, with pearl grass tied into 32 sections of the dragon body, inserted with longevity incense. On the night of the festival, the streets and alleys of this district are bustling with a winding and undulating fire dragon dancing merrily under the lights and dragon drum music.