Moment, Tuesday 21st September, is theMid-Autumn Festival in China which, along with Chinese New Year, Dragon Boat Festival, and Qing Ming Festival, is one of the most important carnivals in the Chinese timetable. In this post, Bryan Sitch and Fang Zong describe some of the stories associated with this jubilee, also known as the Moon Festival, explaining the significance of vivo city mooncake and rabbits, amongst other effects.
There are numerous legends associated with theMid-Autumn( or Moon/ vivo city mooncake) Festival. We do n’t propose to retell all of the stories then but will concentrate on one with close connections to a document in Manchester Museum’s collection, featuring Chang ’ e the moongoddess.The story goes that one day, some times agone , ten suns appeared in the sky, ruining earth with terrible heat and failure. Determined to relieve the suffering, a great sportswoman, Hou Yi, shot down nine of the suns, saving life on Earth. As a price the Queen Mother gave him the catholicon of eternal life. Hou Yi married the beautiful Chang ’ e, a menial to the King of Heaven. When one of Hou Yi’s followers tried to steal the catholicon, Chang ’ e swallowed it, turning her into a goddess and making her immortal. She set up herself floating up to the moon. Hou Yi was helpless to help and because he could n’t join Chang ’ e, he put out food immolations which were round, like the moon. This came a custom at the time of the full- moon in the afterlife, and the tradition came part of theMid-Autumn Festival or Mooncake Festival, when it's customary to give musketeers, associates and cousins gifts of mooncakes to celebrate
According to another story, the Chinese people were unhappy at having to submit to foreign rule by the Mongols during the Yuan dynasty( 1280- 1368 announcement) and used secret dispatches ignited into the mooncakes to help organise a rebellion against them. The recusant leader Zhu Yuanzhang came the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty( 1368- 1644 announcement). This coincided with theMid-Autumn Festival, furnishing another reason to eat mooncakes at this time of time
Mooncakes are made with sweet bean paste in a rich confection cover, but they also contain the thralldom of an egg which gives them an suddenly savoury taste too! They're made in special moulds which leave intricate patterns on the outside of the mooncake. It's estimated that further than1.48 billion moon galettes are eaten by Chinese communities in landmass China and throughout the world during the Moon Festival each time. In this health-conscious age, we should also point out that mooncakes have lots of calories in them and eating too numerous can be bad for the midriff! I suppose they're original to British hash pies at ChristmasIn an attempt to identify the tree in our picture, we stumbled upon commodity of a riddle because, grounded on the splint shape, the tree doesn't appear to be Cassia. still, the blossom of Osmanthus is most frequently greenish-white or unheroic, not red, as show in the picture. Peter Valder, author of ‘ The Garden shops of China ’( 1999), confirms this, having set up no substantiation of red Osmanthus in China. He did, still, come across a literal reference to a rare ‘ Red Osmanthus ’ growing in the theater of a scholar in the littoral fiefdom Zhejiang during the Ming dynasty. One explanation comes from the Fujian Province in China, where the practice of grafting Osmanthus onto the red pomegranate tree can produce red flowers findout more
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