The message of moon cakes

I was given a moon cake for breakfast today by a colleague. It is rude to say no to these things, especially when she had saved it from a dinner at a renowned Chinese restaurant, so I said a hearty thank you and proceeded to bite into the egg-custard and duck egg mix wrapped in pastry as if it was manna from Heaven.

The pastry for these round little things is made with flour, syrup, eggs and rice wine, left to harden for about six hours or so and then stuffed with the traditional mix of lotus seed paste and two duck egg yolks. The combination is then moulded on a wooden mould carved with decorations, glazed and baked. Every self-respecting bakery or restaurant in Hong Kong sells boxes of these heavy pastries during the run up to the Mid-Autumn Festival - even Starbucks offers up its own variety: Espresso Mooncakes. The artery-clogging mix of egg, egg and more egg usually means that the more weight-conscious ladies divide up each moon cake into quarters to share with friends. I try to aim for the yolk-less quarter. Somehow the combination of savoury and sweet does not appeal to my palate and the lotus seed mix is too dry for me.

Why, I mused as I stopped to peer into the inside of my own moon cake to check I was singling out the egg yolk parts, do Chinese people eat moon cakes?

There are at least three different legends I've uncovered. The first is the so-called historical one, which is that the moon cakes were used to pass on secret messages amongst the Chinese rebels to mobilise them successfully in an uprising on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month against the then ruling Mongols in the Yuan dynasty (A.D. 1280 - 1376, or 1368, depending on your source). The Han Chinese then went on to establish the Ming dynasty and their descendants eat the moon cakes on that same day every year to celebrate that fact.

The second depicts the story of Chang-Er, the Moon goddess. There are so many variations of this story I can only sum up the gist of them - that Chang-Er drank her husband's elixir of life (which was his reward for shooting down nine sinister moons that had appeared to terrorise the Earth) and was banished to the Moon to live with a furry rabbit (the furry rabbit has another legend of its own). Chang-Er is the beautiful lady in an extravagant costume depicted on many thousands of boxes of moon cakes sold in the shops.

The third story is about the furry rabbit, who is better known as the Jade Rabbit. He offered himself as a sacrifice to feed three fairies who had disguised themselves as beggars, and as a reward for his kind-heartedness the fairies allowed him to live in the Moon palace, where he became known as the Jade Rabbit. He is sometimes depicted as pounding the elixir of life with a pestle and mortar.

It is surprising that none of the stories I have learned about have a link to the fact that this is the harvesting season. I had assumed (probably influenced by my knowledge of Korean culture) that I would find something pointing to an ancient agricultural society. The Koreans celebrate chusoek or han-gawi around this time of year, which is very clearly a harvesting festival dating back to the Kokuryo dynasty (B.C. 19 - A.D. 18). The second thing to note is the story of the rabbit. In Korean folklore, the Moon is often depicted as the home of a rabbit making rice cake by pounding at a pestle. I didn't expect to find a mention of a rabbit in Chinese folklore as well. Then I remembered a conversation from my childhood with my mother about rabbits. I had told her I liked the White Rabbit in 'Alice in Wonderland'.
"They have red eyes," my mother said. "They look strange."
"They don't have red eyes!" I said, never having seen a live rabbit at that age but still disturbed at the thought of a red-eyed animal.
"Yes they do. The white ones do," said my mother firmly. "They're strange."

Rabbit or no rabbit, I need to finish the remaining half of my moon cake, but I've come to the yolky part.