Mid-Autumn Festival

Today, the fifteen day of the eighth lunar month, is Mid-Autumn Festival, or Zhongqiu Jie (中秋节). It is also known as Mooncake Festival, and Lantern Festival. This festival is celebrated primarily in China, started some 2,000 years ago, with significant observances in Taiwan, Hong and Macau. When immigrants came to South-eat Asia, they brought the festival with them. Now Chinese communities in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam celebrate the Lantern Festival too, albeit in a smaller way.

Celebrations on this day include display of lanterns, solving riddles, songs and dances, and eating of moon-cakes. Moon-cakes are Chinese pastries filled with bean paste, or lotus paste.

Through the years, as people got more creative, the lanterns, and moon-cakes became more fanciful. And like most festivals and rituals of old, these days the event is very commercialised. Nowadays, few people know the origin and the story behind the celebration.

Over here in Singapore, the festival is marked by displays of lanterns in Chinatown, the Jurong Gardens and Gardens by the bay. In the Gardens by the Bay, besides the display of lanterns, there is a mini fair. There are also stage performances of cultural songs, dance and instrumentals.

Some photos of the lanterns on display in Chinatown.

These are moon-cakes. Some had melon seeds in them.

The original moon-cakes were bean paste wrapped in pastry skins.

Over time, people got more creative. The put salted egg yolks in the moon cakes.

Now, moon-cakes come in all sorts of flavours. Some of them are nothing more than dessert disguised as moon-cakes – in my opinion.

One piece of 'high-end' moon-cake cost anything between $15 SGD to $20 SGD, or more if they are popular brand names. It’s a once a year thing. Like all festivals that happen once a year, all businesses do their best to cash in on the occasion.

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