This Chinese equivalent to the West’s Harvest Moon Festival (also known as Mid autumn festivals) is one of the loveliest nights of the year. Part of the celebrations commemorate a 14th-Century uprising against the Mongols when rebels wrote the call to revolt on pieces of paper and embedded them in cakes which they smuggled to compatriots.

Today, during the festival, people eat special sweet cakes known as “Chinese mooncakes” made of ground lotus and sesame. Along with the cakes, shops sell coloured Chinese paper lanterns in the shapes of animals, and more recently, in the shapes of aeroplanes and space ships. On this family occasion parents allow children to stay up late, and take them to high vantage points to light their lanterns and watch the huge autumn moon rise before eating their moon cakes. Public parks are a blaze with many thousands of lanterns in all colours and sizes and shapes in welcoming the Moon cakes festival.

Source : http://kevdesign.com/midautumnfestival/eastmeetwest.htm

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 at 3:23 am and is filed under Flowers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.