Wishing you a Healthy and Tranquil Mid-Autumn Festival!
This year the Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival will take place on Tuesday 17th September. The day of the festival changes every year because like many Asian events it follows a lunar calendar. In this article I’ll talk about some interesting aspects of this festival.
Let’s start with a poem:
‘ rēn yǒu bēi huān lí hé yuè yǒu yīn qíng yuán quē cǐ shì gǔ nān quān
人 有 悲 欢 离 合， 月 有 阴 晴 圆 缺，此 事 古 难 全。
People may have sorrows and joys, partings and reunions, as well as the moon is bright or dim, wax and wane. Rarely have things been perfect since the ancient times.
dàn yuàn rén cháng jiǔ qiān lǐ góng chán juān
但 愿 人 长 久，千 里 共 婵 娟。
May we live long and share the beauty of the moon together, even if we are hundreds of miles apart.’
These lines are from the poem ‘Mid Autumn Festival Tune’ by the eleventh century poet, Sū Shì 苏 轼. To me they express the cultural meaning of Mid Autumn perfectly. In China it is also called the Family Reunion Festival. At its heart lies the poignant, poetic idea of 赏月, shǎngyuè, or appreciating the beauty of the full moon while filling your thoughts with loved ones, whether near or far.
Sū Shì and the Moon
There is a folk story of separated lovers to accompany the festival’s theme. The story concerns a fabulous archer called Hòu Yì and his beautiful wife, Cháng’é, the Lady in the Moon. The story starts with an ecological disaster as all life on Earth is threatened by the arrival of ten suns burning up the planet. Heroically, Hòu Yì climbs a mountain and using his bow and arrow shoots down nine of the threatening suns. As a reward he is given a pill of immortality. Soon afterwards he married Cháng’é, a beautiful, kind and down to earth woman.
All goes well until the villainous Peng Meng arrives on the scene. He wants to get his hands on the pill of immortality. One day when Hòu Yì is out, he sneaks into his home to find the pill. Cháng’é comes across him and in her desperation to stop his evil plan, swallows the pill to keep it out of his hands. Immediately Cháng’é turned into light and floated through the sky towards the heavens. However as she flew ever higher, Cháng’é cried out to stay with her husband and so she came to live on the moon, the nearest heavenly body to Earth.
Of course the loving and faithful Hòu Yì spent the rest of his days gazing up at the moon, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife. And in this maybe we can find the origin of shǎngyuè!
There is even another story about Hòu Yì and Cháng’é which concerns the origin of ‘yuèbing’, the Mooncakes which are the symbolic delicacy of this festival. Cháng’é, full of pity and compassion for the inconsolable Hòu Yì, told him to make a copy of the pill of immortality out of flour and paste. She instructed him to place this surrogate pill at the West Gate of their house under the full moon and call out her name. In the magical conditions of the mid-autumn full moon Cháng’é was then allowed to be reunited with her grieving husband for just one night every year.
As is so often the case in China, myths and legends seem to grow from ancient histories and ideas of cosmic harmony. There is evidence that the Mid Autumn Festival dates back to over 3,000 years ago when China was an agricultural society. As we know from the festivals of the Summer and Winter Solstice in Europe, in these ancient societies life was tied to solar and lunar events. The historical origin of Mid-Autumn is more than likely an act of worship carried out under the first full moon after the harvest to give thanks to nature for its life sustaining gifts. These rituals seem to have been turned into something like the modern festival in the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618 – 907).
What of the modern Mid-Autumn festivities? Inevitably travel and shopping have become popular activities for the three days public holiday. Social media channels are full of popular brands putting modern spins on ancient themes to attract consumers to their special offers and discounts. However traditions remain. Moon cakes with a bewildering variety of contents remain as popular as ever so that we can think of others as we bite into the perfectly round moon pastry. My school has closed and all the chatter of the children is about getting together with extended family for a moon festival feast, oh and receiving a gift or two.
Is there a parallel to Mid-Autumn festival in Britain? It seems no longer, but I’m sure some of you are old enough to remember Harvest Festival celebrations at school which used to take place at about this time. I recollect we used to bring food stuffs to school which were collected in the Assembly Hall where we gathered to sing the Harvest hymn –
‘We plow the fields and scatter
The good seed on the land,
But it is fed and watered
By God’s almighty hand’
And then in an act of charity the food we had harvested together would be distributed in the community, to those in need. Surely there are connections here to Mid-Autumn, bringing people together after the back breaking farming summer to share the fruits of their labour.
Perhaps China remains closer to its agricultural and communal origins than Britain, but the same roots surely grow under our feet in both countries.
See you beneath the Mid-Autumn moon!
I’ll risk closing with a poem of my own:
Harvest Moon
Tonight’s autumn horizon is empty:
save a lone face in the darkness above,
a round white chrysanthemum moon,
radiant blossom of the blackest night,
ringed around by ice tears, petal stars.
Look, tears roll over Chang’e’s cheek,
parting? or greeting? silver fragments
of forever, distinct and distant as love.
Osmanthus scented by moonlight,
she lingers here, drawn to dawn’s door,
forever coupled, forever torn away,
the push and pull of the heart’s gravity.
Pristine lunar beauty, autumn harvest,
she gazes at us, void of ivory tenderness.