The Supermoon & Asian Moon Festival

While the supermoon and blood moon are the reasons for moon gazing this Sunday to mainstream Americans, many Asian immigrants will add one more: the Moon Festival, which dates back more than three millennia to China’s Shang and Zhou Dynasties.

The Chinese Moon Festival began as a celebration for the harvest moon, but evolved into a holiday for family reunions. Since China used to dominate East Asia, Moon Festival customs spread to other East Asian countries. Korea and Vietnam in particular are still celebrating this traditional holiday on the 15th of the eighth month on the Asian lunar calendar.

Moon cakes, the quintessential dessert for the Moon Festival, are available at all the Asian markets in Cupertino and most other cities in the Bay Area. They are just as round as the full moon.

In China’s history, moon cakes once contributed to the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, established by Mongolians who were culturally different from the mainstream Chinese, called Han. As the Han Chinese were unhappy about the Mongolian rule, they rebelled many times but failed. The rebels finally managed to unite by hiding their messages in moon cakes, which the Mongolians didn’t eat.

The rebels replaced Yuan with a new dynasty named Ming (1368-1644). Emperors of the Ming Dynasty certainly appreciated the Moon Festival and therefore encouraged people to celebrate it more elaborately, making it a more and more important Chinese holiday.

Moon festival customs have regional differences. Below is a book excerpt about Moon Festival traditions in Jiangsu Province, historically one of China’s most fertile regions.

The 15th of the eighth lunar month is my birthday, and it was the happiest day for villagers in my hometown. At this time of year, all the crops had been harvested. Chickens were plump and ducks meaty. Water chestnuts, lotus roots, all types of fruit and vegetables, fish, shrimp, and crabs were all in abundance. They all tasted extremely delicious!

Everyone ate well and dressed well. Then we greatly enjoyed the poetic and picturesque night with the brightest and fullest moon. In the meantime, we were delighted about our family reunion.

All Chinese eat Moon cakes during the Moon Festival. In my hometown, we had one more dim sum item on this holiday: sticky cakes. We made them from scratch by grinding glutinous rice into powder first. Then we added water to the ground glutinous rice and created a dough. We also made a savory filling by stir-frying green vegetables, pork, black mushrooms, and bamboo shoots. Each sticky cake was about the size of the palm. We used low heat to slowly bake the sticky cakes in a pan. They tasted much better than moon cakes.

Customarily, married daughters in my hometown, Taizhou of Jiangsu Province, returned to their parents’ house on the 16th of the eighth lunar month to eat sticky cakes. I’m not sure how this custom originated. However, I think moon cakes might have evolved from sticky cakes.

Note: The book excerpt is from Nine Memorable Decades, authored by Yu-ting Chi, a China-born former lawyer in Taiwan and grandfather of the book’s translator, Star Patcher Crystal Tai. The electronic version of the book is available on Kindle and free to Kindle subscribers:　http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Memorable-Decades-Yu-Ting-Chi-ebook/dp/B015QGSBVW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443285468&sr=8-1&keywords=nine+memorable+decades+kindle