The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the most cherished of Chinese festivals, kept on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month (September-October), when the harvest moon is at its brightest and, by tradition, its roundest and fullest. Its themes are thanksgiving for the harvest and, above all, reunion: the round full moon is an emblem of the family circle made whole, and the festival is a time for the scattered members of a family to gather, so that it is second only to the Lunar New Year as an occasion of homecoming. Where gathering is impossible, the shared sight of the same full moon is itself a bond, a sentiment celebrated in classical Chinese poetry.
Its signature food is the mooncake, a dense round pastry filled with sweet lotus-seed or red-bean paste and often a salted egg yolk standing for the moon, exchanged as a gift and shared among family. Families admire the full moon together, children carry brightly coloured lanterns, and the festival is woven with legend, above all the tale of Chang'e, the lady who swallowed the elixir of immortality and flew to dwell on the moon, where she is imagined still. Some make offerings to the moon or to the ancestors. Celebrating gratitude, family unity and the beauty of the autumn moon, the festival is a public holiday across the Chinese world and is kept in Vietnam and Korea in related forms.