Ch 25 · Lesson 26Mandarin · Chapter 25 · Lesson 26 · Themed review
The festival year
Lanterns, tombs, dragon boats and mooncakes. (yuè) is the month and the moon at once, which is why the calendar and the festivals keep meeting.
Practise this lesson
13-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Lanterns, tombs, boats and the moon
The Spring Festival is the big one, but the 传统 (chuántǒng), traditional, year has four more festivals that every Mandarin speaker knows. Three of them follow the lunar calendar, so their dates move against the Western one.
The four
| Festival | When | What people do | What they eat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 宵 (Yuánxiāojié), the Lantern Festival | 15th day of the 1st lunar month | lanterns, and riddles to solve; it closes the New Year season | (tāngyuán) or 宵 (yuánxiāo), sweet balls of sticky rice |
| 清明 (Qīngmíngjié), Tomb-Sweeping Day | 4, 5 or 6 April | families visit their ancestors' graves, clean them and leave offerings | |
| (Duānwǔjié), the Dragon Boat Festival | 5th day of the 5th lunar month | dragon boat races | (zòngzi), sticky rice wrapped in leaves |
| (Zhōngqiūjié), the Mid-Autumn Festival | 15th day of the 8th lunar month | families gather to look at the full moon | (yuèbǐng), mooncakes |
Tomb-Sweeping Day is the odd one out. It is fixed to the sun, not the moon, which is why it always falls in early April, in 春天 (chūntiān), the spring.
月 (yuè) is the moon and the month
You met 月 (yuè) as month: 一月 (yīyuè), January, is literally month one. It is also the moon, which is no coincidence, since a lunar month runs from one new moon to the next. So 月饼 (yuèbǐng) is a moon cake, and 中秋 (Zhōngqiū) is the middle of 秋天 (qiūtiān), the autumn, on the night of the full moon.
The story told at Mid-Autumn is of 嫦娥 (Cháng'é), who swallowed an elixir, flew up to the moon and lives there still. The round moon and the round cakes both stand for the family being whole, so it is a night to spend at home, and a hard one to be away, when people 想念 (xiǎngniàn), miss, the family they cannot be with.
Boats and a poet
The Dragon Boat Festival remembers 屈原 (Qū Yuán), a poet and minister of the ancient state of Chu who, the story goes, drowned himself in a river. The 船 (chuán), boats, race in his memory, and a dragon boat 比赛 (bǐsài), race, is the event of the day. In 2009 it became the first Chinese festival on UNESCO's list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
粽子 (zòngzi) are made of sticky 米 (mǐ), rice, and you 包 (bāo), wrap, them in leaves. In the north they are often sweet, with red bean paste; in the south, savoury, with meat and egg.
Holidays
On the mainland, Tomb-Sweeping Day, the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival have been public holidays since 2008. The 历史 (lìshǐ), history, of each is far older than that.