Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the most charming and colourful annual events that celebrates, among other things, harvest time with the biggest and brightest moon of the year.

The festival also commemorates a 14th Century uprising against the Mongols. 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.

Today, during the festival, people eat special sweet cakes known as "Moon Cakes" made of ground lotus and sesame seed paste, egg-yolk and other ingredients. Along with the cakes, shops sell colourful Chinese paper lanterns in the shapes of animals, and more recently, in the shapes of aeroplanes and space ships.

On this family occasion, parents allow children to stay up late and take them to high vantage points such as The Peak to light their lanterns and watch the huge autumn moon rise while eating their moon cakes. Public parks are ablaze with many thousands of lanterns of all colours, sizes and shapes. There are lantern carnivals and lantern exhibitions over Hong Kong. Drop by Victoria Park for the Lantern Wonderland where you will see a giant lantern.

For the three nights straddling the Mid-Autumn Festival, visitors can also see one of the most spectacular sights imaginable. It's a 67-metre-long 'fire dragon' that winds its way with much fanfare and smoke through a collection of streets located in Tai Hang, close to Victoria Park in Causeway Bay.

Over a century ago, Tai Hang was a coastal village whose inhabitants lived off farming and fishing. A few days before the Mid-Autumn Festival a typhoon and then a plague wreaked havoc on the village. While the villagers were repairing the damage, a python entered the village and ate their livestock. According to some villagers, the python was the son of the Dragon King.

A soothsayer decreed the only way to stop the chaos was to stage a fire dance for three days and nights during the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival. The villagers made a huge dragon of straw and covered it with incense sticks, which they then lit. Accompanied by drummers and erupting firecrackers, they danced for three days and three nights – and the plague disappeared.

Just recently, the Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance was successfully included into China’s third national intangible cultural heritage list.

For more information, please visit www.taihangfiredragon.hk.