Mid-Autumn Festival

A note came home from a teacher on Friday requesting photos of the children enjoying the festive events of the weekend to send into school the following week. Peacefully unaware of any imminent festivities I was grateful to the internet for filling the gaping holes in our local knowledge and thus a festive programme of events was quickly drawn up.

A legend dating from 1880 relates how one stormy night the villagers of Tai Hang killed a serpent only to discover that the dead body of the serpent had vanished the next morning. Days later, a plague broke out in Tai Hang and many people died. A village elder saw Buddha in a dream and was told to perform a Fire Dragon Dance and to burn fire crackers in the Mid-Autumn Festival. The sulphur in the fire crackers drove away the plague and the villagers were saved. Ever since then, the residents of Tai Hang have performed their Fire Dragon Dance for three nights during the Mid-Autumn Festival to commemorate the event

We made our way to Tai Hang and, at the end of a narrow road in an atypical low-rise part of town, we found roads partitioned off and lined with expectant crowds. The children pushed their way to the front, courtesy of their magical blonde hair while Malcolm and I, lacking the charm of youth but enjoying Caucasian height, bobbed around at the back.

The advent of the dragon was announced by huge lanterns held over the street on poles. These were closely followed by a cluster of little Chinese girls dressed in pink and gold satin pyjamas and carrying lanterns in the shape of lotus flowers. Next, to our considerable delight, came that obvious symbol of Chinese cultural history, the bagpipe band. The Chinese “Red Tartans” marched back and forth piping traditional airs in full ornamental Highland dress. Our giggles were stifled only when a concerned bystander reminded us that Hong Kong had after all been a British colony for many years. Of course, what better reason to don kilts, white leather buttoned spats and bearskins in temperatures of 33 degrees plus?

And suddenly the dragon was upon us; bounding from side to side, swaying his huge tail and flinging sparks from his incense stick spines into the awestruck crowd. Bourne aloft by 40 or 50 young men, he lurched right past us, down a barely lit side street and then returned, affording us an excellent view and a good covering of ash. And then he was gone; a shy fantastical creature that had appeared, performed his party piece and retired to his lair.

The following night was Chung Chiu or the Moon Festival which takes place every year on the 15th night of the 8th lunar month. According to one story the Mid-Autumn Festival commemorates a 14th Century uprising against the Mongol rulers. In a cunning plan, the rebels wrote the call to revolt on pieces of paper and embedded them in cakes that they smuggled to compatriots inside a besieged city. The lotus seed paste cakes were not eaten by the Mongols and thus the emperor-to-be was able to take the city and the throne.

We headed for Victoria Park in Causeway Bay to enjoy the festivities. Buying moon cakes to eat under the bright mid-autumn harvest moon was easier said than done. I assumed they’d be on sale everywhere but a desperate search for a bakery in the streets around Causeway Bay revealed the weak link in my plan. Dejectedly I queued at the 7-11 store and asked one last time if they knew of anywhere I could find moon cakes. Having surmounted the usual interpretation issues, the face of the sales assistant lit up and she bustled off, returning minutes later with a boxed gift set of moon cakes, entitled “Bold Knights of Disney”. Too tired to question whether Mickey Mouse Moon Cakes really were traditional and not wanting to disappoint the kind lady who had just unearthed the last four moon cakes in Hong Kong I handed over the cash and went to find the others.

Victoria Park was awash with 2 million Chinese doing what you do at the Mid-Autumn Festival – wandering about and enjoying the stage shows and the coloured lantern displays while eating popcorn and ice cream and waving luminous neon light sticks. So much for my romantic notion of picnicking on moon cakes with our traditional paper lanterns. No one was vaguely interested in the moon. Our paper lanterns lasted minutes at most and each of the children took one bite of the oily lotus seed paste cake before spitting it out in disgust.

So we bought neon light sticks for the children and gave the remaining cakes to the Shouson Hill Road porters on our return. Let’s hope they didn’t share the Mongols’ and our opinion that they really weren’t worth eating, and that the strictly non-traditional Mickey Mouse design on the top of the cakes went unnoticed.