[ad_1]
“LOVE you to the moon and back” as a phrase could not have been more true for the legend behind the mooncake festival.
Each year the legend comes to life as the stories of the archer hero Hou Yi who pines for his wife Chang-Er, who now lives on the moon, are remembered during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
She had swallowed an elixir that transformed her into an immortal in an attempt to save the precious liquid from her evil nemesis, Peng Meng.
As such, she immediately floated to the moon, never to return.
The second most important Chinese festival after the Lunar New Year, the tale of this celebration is one of several interesting facets that can be the food for idle chat while you and your friends or family sip tea while enjoying moon cakes.
1 shared Asian celebration
The Mid-Autumn Festival is not only celebrated by the Chinese. The Japanese celebrate tsukimi (observation of the moon) while the Koreans celebrate Chuseok by visiting their ancestral homes. They both celebrate it as a harvest festival.
The Vietnamese also celebrate Tet Trung Thu (Children’s Festival) on the same lunar date. People in Cambodia celebrate the “moon and water festival” in late October to November, where they pay homage to the moon. According to their folklore, a rabbit lives there and protects its people.
2 flashlight fun
Children in Guang-dong province carved grapefruit skin in the shape of animals or plants.
They put candles inside the grapefruit skins to turn them into lanterns. Did you know that the Chinese traditionally celebrate the end of the Lunar New Year with a lantern festival?
3 Evolution of the Festival
The emperors of the Zhou dynasty worshiped the moon as a harvest. Later, it was popularized in the early Tang dynasty by the upper class who engaged in drinking, singing and dancing in celebration.
Commoners followed suit later.
Thanks in part to mooncakes, which were first introduced to 13th-century China, the Ming dynasty emerged later, and people celebrated the festival with even more pomp and ancient pyrotechnics like fire dragon dances and pagodas in Llamas built with bricks and tiles, filled with wood and bamboo.
4 moon worship
In ancient times, the festival was a period when people built altars in their front yard, with incense, chandeliers, and offerings of food to pray for their families, asking for good health, prosperity, successful spousal search, fertility, beauty and happiness.
5 did ‘Hu’ give mooncake its name?
Once upon a time, the ancient Chinese ate hu cakes (hu means mustaches) during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Legend has it that the emperor of the Tang Dynasty, Li Longji, didn’t think much about the name of hu cakes.
While chewing on ideas together with him, his favorite concubine, the legendary beauty Yang Guifei, was inspired by the silver light in the sky and suggested the name “moon cake.”
6 Revolution, a piece of (moon) cake
In an attempt to end the Yuan Dynasty, the Han Chinese, led by General Zhu Yuanzhang, sent messages embedded in mooncakes reporting an “uprising on the fifteenth night of the eighth month” to resistance forces against the rulers. Mongols.
His brilliant strategy succeeded and the Ming dynasty was born. People commemorated the uprising by sending mooncakes on the same date every year.
7 family pastry tradition
Making mooncakes used to be a family gathering activity before the tradition died out and bakeries took over. One of the oldest traditional artisan mooncake makers in the country is located on Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur.
With a history of 85 years, Seong Ying Chai was reopened in 2018 and only bakes small batches according to orders during the mooncake festival season. One of her famous creations is the massive seven yolk salted egg moon cake.
8 custom crab crawl
In Tianjin, families released crabs carrying candles in their shells to their home compound during the festival.
If the crabs crawled towards the door, it meant that the family would suffer financial setbacks, but if the crabs crawled inside the house, the family would gain wealth. The crabs would eventually end up on the dinner table. Talk about bad luck for these creatures.
9 unexpected gold mine
In 2017, “Most Expensive Commercial Moon Cake” entered the Malaysian Book of Records with its 1.24kg snow skin moon cake measuring 17.5cm and 4cm thick. It was sold for RM3,888!
Ingredients for this entree include 24-karat gold flakes, ginseng, cordyceps, and bird’s nest. What took the cake was when 33 chefs from the Six Happiness Group baked what they considered to be the world’s largest moon cake, weighing in at 2,348 kg.
The Sunday Star in 2001 reported that the mooncake had a circumference of 3.1 m and a height of 25.4 cm.
The cake cost RM56,000 to produce.
Six years later, the Guinness Book of World Records confirmed that the world’s largest moon cake was in China: it weighed 12.98 tons and could be shared by 110,000 people.
10 Mooncake variations
Different regions have different styles and fillings of mooncakes. Cantonese mooncakes are generally sweet with fillings of lotus paste and egg yolk.
Guangdong province, where Cantonese hail from, has mooncakes that contain ham, melon seed paste, chicken, duck, or roast pork.
Snow skin mooncakes, which need to be stored in the refrigerator, originated in Hong Kong.
Yunnan mooncakes are filled with ham or flowers. Beijing-style moon cakes are meticulously decorated, while Suzhou-style moon cakes, such as Shanghai moon cake, have puff pastry.
11 funky flavors
Some of the most creative moon cake flavors on the market to date include instant noodle moon cake, gin or hu tiao wine infused moon cake, Milo dinosaur moon cake, root, bak kwa (grilled meat) moon cake, tom yum moon cake, and even dried shrimp moon cake. Malaysians are adventurers.
12 It’s a Moonlight Romance
This festival is known as the second Valentine’s Day amidst Chinese festivals, with the first being the fifteenth day of the first month.
The soft glow of the moonlight, the festive air, and the cute lanterns of antiquity made it the perfect time to meet potential life partners.
[ad_2]
