Explainer | Mid-Autumn Festival in Hong Kong – from mooncakes and lanterns to fire dragon dances, how it is celebrated
- Mid-Autumn Festival is almost upon us, and that means lots of mooncakes and, in one corner of Hong Kong until the pandemic, the Tai Hang fire dragon dance
- The second biggest Chinese holiday of the year is full of tradition – but also excess: millions of mooncakes and the packaging they come in end up in landfills
The glow of lanterns, savoury and sweet mooncakes, and a beaming full moon will mark celebrations for the second biggest Chinese holiday of the year, Mid-Autumn Festival, on September 10.
Across many cultures, celebrating the harvest is of great importance, but no harvest festival comes with such a history and collection of tales as the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival.
It is celebrated on the night when the moon is at its fullest and brightest – on the 15th day of the eighth month in the lunar calendar.
When picturing Mid-Autumn Festival, most think of sharing mooncakes – the sweet snack synonymous with the festival – but as the lanterns begin to hang anew, the Post explores the festival beyond the food and decorations.
Song dynasty Chinese poet Su Shi wrote of the festival:
“May we live long and share the beauty of the moon together, even if we are hundreds of miles apart.”
That idea of celebrating together imbues the festival in Hong Kong, where the Monday following Mid-Autumn Festival is a public holiday, giving families a three-day weekend to fully appreciate the coming and going of the full moon.
Gatherings and celebrations
Families take lanterns to display when they celebrate the festival at lantern carnivals in the city’s parks and housing estates.
The fire dragon dance can feature up to 300 performers, who parade a dragon made of straw stuck with glowing incense sticks through the narrow streets of Tai Hang village, on Hong Kong Island near Causeway Bay.
In the 19th century Tai Hang was a poor fishing village populated by people of the Hakka minority. In 1880, so the legend goes, Tai Hang suffered a plague that was dispelled only after villagers made a dragon from straw, covered it with lit joss sticks and paraded it around the village. The dance became a yearly event.
The event has been inscribed on a national list of intangible cultural heritage. It has not been held since 2019 because of social distancing precautions to curb the spread of Covid-19.
A similar fire dragon dance is held in Pok Fu Lam village during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Tonnes of mooncakes
The quintessential food of the Mid-Autumn “Moon” Festival is the mooncake, a dense pastry traditionally made of lotus seed paste and salted duck egg yolk.
According to the legend, Han Chinese revolutionaries smuggled messages inside mooncakes to orchestrate an uprising against their Mongolian rulers.
Moreover, many of the mooncakes are left uneaten. According to environmental charity Green Power, Hong Kong residents threw away more than 2.8 million in 2020.
