Mid-autumn Festival - the true story!

photo: huge dragon lantern with one of the mischievous brothers.

Mid-autumn festival

This is one of the main holidays in China. People celebrate for about a month before the actual day. This festival is to celebrate the full moon that occurs in the fall – we call it the harvest moon. At the office this holiday involves receiving lots of mooncakes and fruit baskets from companies we work with. I can’t even tell you how many tins of mooncakes we got (with at least 4 cakes per tin). I would guess at least 10. Then some companies sent non-traditional mooncakes that contained things like red bean paste & sesame paste with soft centers of fruit paste. My favorite was a mocha paste with chocolate center – it was too sweet for the other’s in the office. The outside of these has a soft rice paste shell. The Chinese staff prefer the traditional mooncakes (lotus flower paste with a semi-cooked duck egg yolk in the center). They sent me home with all the non-traditional cakes, which I shared with my classmates. This is also a holiday of lanterns so the city is decorated with lit up lanterns & lights on the buildings. On the actual day of the full moon people all go to places where the moon is easy to see, like beaches or parks & they carry lanterns to light the way. It is really very beautiful.

During this time you see many things with a beautiful woman, named Chang e, and a rabbit who is always with her on the moon. I’d been told before that she is the woman who lives in the moon with the white rabbit. I never got more of an explanation than that until my Mandarin teacher told us the story. There are also references to 10 brothers which I didn’t understand before either.

Way back in the very olden days China had 10 suns in the sky. These suns were all brothers and they went into the sky at different times, so that at any one time the people on earth only saw one sun. The parents of these brothers were named Chang e (the mother) and Hou Yi (the father). They were fairies who lived in the heavens with the Emperor of Heaven. One day the brothers got silly and they all went into the sky at once. This made the Emperor of Heaven very angry and he told the father to do something about his sons. So Hou Yi took a bow and arrow and killed 9 of the suns/sons.

The Emperor was furious with Hou Yi for killing the suns, so he decided to punish the couple. He made the couple regular people so they could not live in Heaven any more. The wife was a very selfish and vain woman and did not want to be a mortal. She did not want to get old and die. So Chang e went to the magic queen and got a potion that would make her stay young forever. The queen gave her enough for both she and her husband, but Chang e was so selfish that she took it all herself.

Chang e stays young and beautiful and does not like her old husband anymore. The husband is so lonely that the Emperor sends him to the moon to live with a white rabbit as company (I didn’t really get that part, it doesn’t make sense, but then it’s a fable). The husband eventually dies. The Emperor of Heaven makes Chang e go to the moon eventually, but her husband is already dead. So now she lives in the moon still with the white rabbit. Even though she is very beautiful, she was not a good person & was very selfish.

Someone told me that she can come back to earth to visit just once a year on the fall full moon. Someone else told me that is a different holiday.

The dragon lantern in the photo above is 80 meters long. The dragon is a symbol of good luck, ambition, peace and prosperity. The photo is just a small part of a gigantic dragon lantern with the 10 brothers surrounding it. Near the dragons mouth there is a shiny globe that I'm assuming represents the sun that was left in the sky. The brothers are renowned for thier supernatural powers (I guess that explains why the Emperor was so pissed off at the dad for killing them).