The Legacy of Mid-autumn Festival

      Mid-Autumn Festival – a time for enjoying mooncakes with family members, with brightly lit Chinese paper-made lantern surrounding the front yard of the house, and children lighting up candles and playing with their lanterns. This festival is vaguely associated to different origins; some folklores and some historical event. For instance, the many versions of the Legend of Chang Er, the mythical Moon Goddess of Immortality, is the folklore that is often told by the elderly people to children, who claimed that that’s the reason why the Chinese celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival.

     Apart from that, a historical event that is linked to this festival would be the use of mooncake as a medium by the Ming revolutionaries in their espionage attempt to secretly deliver letters in order to overthrow the Mongolian rulers of China in the Yuan dynasty. It is said that these mooncakes were used to hide a secret message synchronizing the Han rebellion on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month of the Chinese calendar. It is said that this idea was made up by Zhu Yuan Zhang and his advisor Liu Bo Wen, who spread a rumor that a deadly outbreak was thinning out and the only way to prevent it was to eat these special mooncakes.

     Regardless what the origins of the Mid-Autumn Festival are, the Chinese – despite where they reside – are still celebrating it till this very day, although the appearance, designs and taste of mooncakes and their purposes have evolved.