Festivals · Fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month — September or early October, on the year's brightest full moon.
The second most important festival after Chinese New Year, and the most pleasant one to be a visitor for. Families gather outdoors in the evening to eat, drink tea and look at the moon, which on this night is at its fullest and closest. Parks stay open late, lanterns come out again — children carry them in the south — and the whole thing has an unhurried, communal warmth that is easy to be included in. Hong Kong and Guangdong go furthest with the lantern displays; Suzhou's gardens, designed around moon-viewing in the first place, are the connoisseur's answer.
Eat — Mooncakes (月饼) — dense pastry with lotus-seed or red-bean paste around a salted duck-egg yolk standing in for the moon. Divisive, gifted obsessively, and increasingly available in flavours no one over sixty approves of.
We use analytics cookies to see which pages and tours agents actually use, so we can improve them. They are off until you accept. Declining changes nothing about the site — the enquiry form works either way. Privacy notice.
