Also called Zhongqiu Jie, Moon Festival, baiyue (worshipping the moon)
Setting a table of round foods, mooncakes and fruit under the full moon of the eighth lunar month to honor the moon and Chang'e and to pray for the family to be whole.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Keep candles and incense away from paper lanterns, and supervise children with lanterns that use real flames.
Meng Yuanlao's memoir of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng describes Mid-Autumn night, with wealthy families decorating pavilions and townspeople crowding wine shops to view the moon until dawn. By then the festival was a fixed part of the city calendar.
In many households the moon offering was women's work, summed up in the old saying that men do not worship the moon and women do not sacrifice to the Kitchen God. Women and girls bowed at the moon table and prayed for beauty, a good marriage or children.
In Vietnam the festival became mostly a children's night, with star lanterns, lion dances and a moon-viewing feast. The tray of fruits and mooncakes is often shaped into figures, and the moon lady and the man in the moon, Chú Cuội, take Chang'e's place in stories.
Chinese court rites to the moon in autumn go back to the Zhou period, but a popular Mid-Autumn festival took shape in the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), when poets wrote about the bright moon of the eighth month. In the Song (960 to 1279) it became a city festival of moon-viewing, feasting and offerings. Officials and scholars held moon-viewing banquets, and ordinary families set out food and incense.
The myth of Chang'e, who drank the elixir of immortality and rose to the moon where she lives with a jade rabbit, became attached to the night, and mooncakes became its signature food by the Ming. Today it is a public holiday in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, kept as a night of family reunion. In Korea the same full moon is Chuseok, a harvest festival centered on ancestors.
Setting food or water out under the full moon so it can take in the moon's light, then sharing it the next day. Rooted in India's autumn full-moon festival; modern witches do the same with water.
A Japanese autumn custom of setting out rice dumplings, pampas grass and harvest produce for the full moon and sitting quietly to admire it.
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