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| Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!! |
This is not the first time we “celebrate” Mid-Autumn Festival… but somehow this is the first time we get to play with lanterns. 🙂
Mid-Autumn Festival this year is a special one because our small little family get to walk around our small neighbourhood with the lanterns together. Yah. And it’s one of the year which I get to eat the least mooncake. I remember there’s one year which I caught chickenpox during mooncake festival period, but I managed to clear off all the 6 small vegetarian mooncake by myself… I DO LOVE mooncake that much, pity this year I was asked to control my weight thus I did not get to feast on them… hope next year I can just enjoy without constraint 🙂
Story of Mid-Autumn Festival
Once upon a time, there was one day when ten suns rose in the sky together, causing great disaster to people. A hero named Hou Yi (后羿) who was excellent at archery managed to shot down nine of the suns and left only one to provide light.
After Hou yi shot down nine of the ten suns, he was pronounced king by the thankful people. However, he soon became a conceited and tyrannical ruler. In order to live long without death, he got the elixir of immortality.
On one of the fifteenth of August, his wife – Chang er (嫦娥) ate the elixir of immortality in order to prevent her cruel husband to live long and hurt more people. Unexpectedly, she begin to fly higher and higher and landed on the moon.
Thereafter, people offer a sacrifice to Chang er on every lunar fifteenth of August to commemorate her action.
Story of Mooncake
At the end of Yuan Dynasty the Han people’s resistance wanted to overthrow the rule of the Mongols, so they planned an uprising, but they had no way to inform every Han who wanted to join them of the time of the uprising without being discovered by the Mongols.
Mooncakes are the most important food of the Mid-Autumn Festival in China. The military counselor of the Han people’s resistance army, Liu Bowen, thought out a stratagem related to mooncakes. Liu Bowen asked his soldiers to spread the rumor that there would be a serious disease in winter and eating mooncakes was the only way to cure the disease. Then he asked soldiers to write “uprising, at the night of Mid-Autumn Festival” on slips of paper, put them in mooncakes, then sell them to the common Han people.
When the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival came a huge uprising broke out. From then on, people ate mooncakes every Mid-Autumn Festival to commemorate the uprising.
