Mid-Autumn Celebration Time for Festival and Family Reunion

Mid-Autumn Festival: A Moon moment to Remember

This year the Mid-Autumn Festival will fall on October 1st, which is the same day as China National Day. Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the most important traditional festivals in China. Chinese New Year, Tomb-Sweeping Day, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival are four major traditional Chinese festivals. The fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month every year celebrates the Mid-Autumn Festival, where people will take a day off on this day and return to their hometowns to reunite with their relatives. It witnesses the full moon and family reunion. In ancient China, festival time was mostly related to the Moon’s movement. The moon symbolizes softness and brightness, and brings joy to people. People see the Moon as God’s witness of themselves. This harmony of man and nature shows the unique emotion of Chinese people, and the origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is the mid-autumn of a year. Ancient sacrifice and worship of the Moon and the reunion of the people symbolized by the full moon, contributed to the tradition of celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival. The common customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival include family members eating dinner together, just like a Thanksgiving dinner, sharing and eating mooncakes, worshiping the moon with gifts, displaying lanterns, and regional activities.

As a festival that carries reunion and harmony and the pursuit of good feelings, the Mid-Autumn Festival has attracted the attention and love of people from other countries, and every year they participate in related activities in various ways. The series “Mid-Autumn Festival: A Moon moment to Remember” is a brand event held by the Overseas China Cultural Center every year. Considering the current situation of prevention and control of COVID19, with the strong support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Network of International Culturalink Entities(NICE), this year’s brand activities will mainly take an online format. In order to give you a better understanding of the important Chinese traditional festival of Mid-Autumn Festival and create an atmosphere of celebrating this festival, the China Cultural Center in Copenhagen will launch a series of activities on our social media from today on. We hope you can spend the Mid-Autumn Festival together with us by immersing in these rich and colorful content. Today, we will introduce “The Origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival”.

On Mid-Autumn night, the full moon hanging in the sky symbolizes the reunion and harmony of Chinese people. In the poetic masterpiece, Prelude to Water Melody, by famous litterateur Su Dongpo after getting drunk on Mid-Autumn night, the writer poured out his love for his family and revealed his philosophic thoughts on life.

The Mid-Autumn Festival originated in ancient times and became common during the Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD). It was finalized in the early years of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and prevailed after the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The Mid-Autumn Festival is a synthesis of autumn seasonal customs, and most of the festival factors contained in it have ancient origins. The Mid-Autumn Festival uses the full moon to signify the reunion of people, as a place to miss the hometown, the love of loved ones, and hope for a harvest and happiness, and become a rich and precious cultural heritage.