Mid-Autumn Festival

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.

Mooncakes have long doubled as a vehicle for gift-giving between business associates and officials in Chinese society, and by the early twenty-first century a market had developed in extremely elaborate and expensive mooncake gift boxes, sometimes packaged with gold, jewellery or other valuables hidden inside or alongside the pastries, that functioned in practice as a socially acceptable way to pass expensive gifts, including to officials, without it looking like a direct bribe.

The Chinese government's anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping explicitly targeted this practice starting in 2013, issuing directives restricting the use of public funds to purchase luxury mooncakes and warning officials against accepting extravagant mooncake gifts, a crackdown credited with visibly cooling the luxury mooncake market within a few years and pushing mooncake gifting back toward its more modest traditional role as a shared family food rather than a disguised form of high-value gift exchange, a clear example of a centuries-old festival food becoming entangled in, and then reshaped by, entirely contemporary political concerns.

In South Korea, the related autumn festival Chuseok centres less on the moon-gazing and mooncakes described in this entry's first article and more on charye, a rite of ancestral offering performed at home, and on visits to family gravesites; it is one of the two biggest travel occasions of the Korean year alongside the Lunar New Year, prompting a nationwide multi-day public holiday and some of the heaviest domestic travel congestion of the year as workers return to ancestral hometowns.