In the 21st Century, with global communications and greater access to information than at any other time in history, exposure to other cultures is easier and much more intense than it has ever been. Thanks to popular culture and literature, our awareness and understanding of the more intricate elements of other countries has grown significantly. But at the same time, so has our misunderstanding and ignorance.
Chinese culture is one of these, and what with roughly 1/6th of the world’s population being Chinese, (at last count, mainland China had 1,353,821,000, or one billion, three-hundred-and-fifty-three million, eight-hundred and twenty-one thousand people!), aspects of Chinese culture and history have spread around the world just as much in the 21st century as British culture had done in the 19th century, and American culture in the 20th.
The most that the average person knows about Chinese culture is chopsticks and Chinese New Year, mostly from restaurants, or movies and books. But just as how Western societies have their major holidays and festivals like Easter, Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Bonfire Night, and countless religious observances, the Chinese calender is equally loaded with a vast number of festivals and holiday-periods which most people have never heard of. This is a breakdown of the various Chinese festivals and their fascinating histories, legendary though some of them may be. This is not an exhaustive list of every single Chinese festival, it will cover all the major ones, and a few of the minor ones as well.
Chinese New Year/Spring Festival
Ah, Chinese New Year! If you fail your New Year’s resolution, then you get a second chance. Cool, huh?
Also called the SPRING FESTIVAL, the traditional Chinese New Year festivities last for over two weeks (officially, sixteen days). As a two-week holiday would severely disrupt the work-life balance, most people only celebrate the major elements of Chinese New Year. These include New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and the famous and dazzling Chinese Lantern Festival!
Chinese Spring Festival celebrations and traditions are many, and varied. They include wearing red (a Chinese tradition which is attached to any special occasion), lighting firecrackers, giving children, spinsters and bachelors red envelopes with money (“Hong Bao“, literally ‘Red Bags’), Lion Dances, visiting friends and relations and feasting! Chinese New Year is also the traditional date reserved on the calender for family reunions.
Tradition has it that in ancient times, villagers were terrorised by a beast of great savagery and ferocity. It would emerge from the forests every New Year’s Eve to attack the villagers and eat and kill as many of them as it could. Villagers discovered that the monster was afraid of the colour red (supposedly when a little girl wearing a red dress ran through the streets), and so nailed red paper to their front doors to drive the beast away. They also lit firecrackers to scare him off.
Although the beast was eventually defeated, wearing red and lighting firecrackers on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day remains a tradition, to scare off evil spirits, and to bring in a safe and prosperous new year.
New Year celebrations traditionally ended after sixteen days, with the Lantern Festival, for which there are even more numerous origin-stories.
Zhonghe Festival
It’s a Chinese tradition that no housework is to be done in the days before, during, or immediately after the Chinese New Year period. This is to prevent good luck and good fortune from being thrown out of the household along with bad luck and bad fortune. The Zhonghe Festival (which takes place on the second day of the second lunar month) is the first day during which housekeeping may commence without destroying good luck for the year ahead.
Qingming Festival/All Souls Day
Known by a variety of names, Qingming Festival, also called Ancestors’ Day or All Souls Day, is the traditional annual cleaning of tombs and gravestones. Taking place in early April, families will clean and tend to the graves or tombs of their ancestors, ensuring that the family plots and cemeteries are well-maintained.
One of the more notable activities during this period is the burning of ‘Joss Paper’, or ‘Ghost Money’, at local temples, and the burning of joss sticks. This is to ward off evil, and to give ancestors spiritual cash with which to carry on their otherworldly activities. Basically it’s a spiritual pension-fund.
As joss-sticks are only ever burned and set into temples for the dead, it’s considered extremely bad manners to stick your chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice, as it’s seen as an insult to one’s ancestors to do so in jest.
The Dragon Boat Festival
Dragon-boat racing is a popular pastime and sport in China. But there is actually a festival dedicated specifically to it! Known as Longchuan Jie (literally “Dragon-Boat Festival”) in Chinese, the dragon-boat races held on this day commemorate the life of Chinese poet Qu Yuan (343-278B.C.).
Qu Yuan (“Chu Yu’an“) lived during the famous ‘Warring States Period‘ in Chinese history, an era when China was not yet unified, but was instead a hodge-podge of squabbling, infighting minor Chinese kingdoms (literally, warring states!). Under the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, Shi Huang Di, China was gradually unified into one empire.
Lamenting the fall of the Chu Kingdom, Qu Yuan famously committed suicide, by drowning himself in the Miluo River in modern Hunan Province. This act of patriotism earned him great posthumous respect, and to prevent his body from being eaten by fishes, so as to give it a proper burial, people threw rice into the river to distract them. They also got into their boats and raced out into the river to try and retrieve his corpse before it was washed away.
This is commemorated each year by the eating of Zhongzi (rice-parcels wrapped in banana leaves), symbolising the rice thrown into the river, and the boat-races, representing the people who tried to rescue Qu Yuan’s dead body from the water.
The Mid-Autumn Festival/Mooncake Festival
Another of the really famous Chinese festivals is the Mid-Autumn Festival, also commonly called the “Mooncake Festival”. It takes place in Mid-September each year, in the middle of…you guessed it…Autumn!
During this festival, it’s common to eat one of the most famous foods ever to come out of China – Mooncakes! These square or round, gooey-filled cakes have a history which go back centuries.
It was in the 5th century that the name “Mid-Autumn Festival” was made official, but mooncakes themselves are believed to have been developed much later, during the 14th century.
The legend is that they were used to pass secret messages between Ming revolutionaries, who were trying to overthrow the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). The Yuan Dynasty was established by Kublai Khan, grandson of the famous Genghis Khan, which was probably enough incentive for the Chinese to try and get rid of the dynasty which he had created!
Messages were pressed or stamped into the crusts of mooncakes and the cakes were then transported to the revolutionaries. Anyone who picked up a cake would see a whole heap of jibberish – that’s because the messages were never written in-sequence. To read it, you had to cut the cake into slices and rearrange them! You might think that this is pretty easily figured out, but not really.
Whenever you go out to the shops today to buy mooncakes, they’re always sold in sets of four, curious, considering that four is supposed to be an unlucky number in Chinese. But it’s actually another tradition – The coded mooncakes were always transported in sets of four. Every cake was cut into quarters, and the quarters were then rearranged to create the message. Once you’d done that, and read the message, the cake could be eaten to destroy the message…and have dessert! If even one of the cakes was destroyed, the message couldn’t be read, which kept the Ming secrets safe from Mongol spies.
Chinese Festivals as Holidays
Of all these festivals, only a handful are actually holidays. Most Asian countries, such as Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan will celebrate Chinese New Year and mark it as a public holiday, along with the Qingming Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival. All other Chinese festivals are not given holiday-status, and work continues as usual.
This is mostly because if all the Chinese festivals were holidays, combined with Western holidays and other religious and cultural events, it would seriously disrupt peoples’ working lives. As a result, most people celebrate a condensed version of the traditional set of Chinese festivals.
Finding Out More?
Not all the details of all the festivals and holidays are mentioned here, only the major ones, and a couple of the lesser-known ones. The following links will provide you with lots more information: