Mid-Autumn Festival

When it falls

The fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the harvest full moon, in September or early October. A public holiday in China, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

Hòu Yì shot down nine of the ten suns that were burning the earth and was given the elixir of immortality for it. His wife Cháng'é drank it — to keep it from a thief, in the kind telling — and rose to the moon, where she has been since with a jade rabbit that pounds medicine.

He set out her favourite food every year on this night and looked up, and that is the festival: not a story about the moon so much as one about looking at it from a distance and knowing someone else is.

The moon on this night is reckoned the roundest of the year, and round is the same word as reunion, which is the whole festival in one pun.

How the day is kept

• Mooncakes — dense pastry with lotus or red bean and a salted duck-yolk moon inside — cut into wedges so everyone at the table gets a piece.
• Lanterns carried by children, and in Hong Kong the fire-dragon dance at Tai Hang, a dragon of incense sticks run through the streets for three nights.
• Korea keeps the day as Chuseok, the year's largest holiday there: the family travels to the ancestral graves, and songpyeon rice cakes are steamed on pine needles.
• Japan keeps it as Jūgoya, with pampas grass and white tsukimi dango set out where the moon can see them.

More harvest festivals