Some Mid-Autumn Festival Stories

In 2006, To The Tale And Other Such Concerns put up a nice blogpost about Dice And Mooncakes. I refer you to that link for a fun read, as well as a description of the dice game that is played during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Strangely, the dice game that is played here in the Philippines by the local Chinese is not well-known among the majority of the mainland Chinese. According to this article, "Mooncake Gambling Odds-On Festival Favourite", it is common only in Xiamen, in China's Fujian province. I believe that most local Chinese can trace their ancestry to that place, which is why the game is played here. An excerpt from the article (which is a story in itself):

The 300-year-old custom of mooncake gambling dates back to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The inventor, Zheng Chenggong (1624-62), a general of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), stationed his army in Xiamen. Zheng was determined to recover Taiwan, which was occupied by Dutch invaders since 1624.

When every Mid-Autumn Festival came, the soldiers naturally missed their families but fought with heroical determination to drive off the aggressors.

General Zheng and his lower officer Hong Xu invented mooncake gambling to help relieve homesickness among the troops.

The gambling game has six ranks of awards, which are named as the winners in ancient imperial examinations, and has 63 different sized mooncakes as prizes.

Click here for the whole article.

As for the story behind the Festival:

This somewhat complicated moon-landing story goes like this: A woman , Chang-O, was married to the great General Hou-Yi of the Imperial Guard. General Hou was a skilled archer. One day, at the behest of the emperor, he shot down eight of nine suns that had mysteriously appeared in the heaven that morning. His marksmanship was richly rewarded by the emperor and he became very famous. However, the people feared that these suns would appear again to torture them and dry up the planet, so they prayed to the Goddess of Heaven (Wang Mu) to make General Hou immortal so that he could always defend the emperor, his progeny and the country. Their wish was granted and General Hou was given a Pill of Immortality.

For the rest of the story, and a fuller description of the festival, read this article from which the above excerpt was taken: Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival or Mooncake Festival.