Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

03 October, 2009 20:35:00

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The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival, falls on the 15th day of the eighth month on the Lunar calendar.

The luminous full moon is always faithful to be there when Mid-Autumn Day falls, but Chinese people are going beyond their home and tradition to observe the festival that boasts a history of thousands of years.

Wang Jiayue, celebrated the festival Saturday with her family at a lakeside resort that was 70 kilometers away from her home in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province.

"We ate moon cakes while drifting on the tranquil lake glistening with the silver moonlight. That was a perfect place to enjoy the moon", she said.

Traditionally, Mid-Autumn Day, as a festival for family reunion like the Spring Festival, is always observed at home, eating moon cakes, but in recent years, creative young people are going to various places in a hope to make the holiday a poetic, romantic and more joyous occasion, partly thanks to the government's decision to make the festival a public holiday. More than 10,000 travelers Saturday gathered at Tianshan Grand Canyon, 40 km from Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where they rode horses by the canyon's serene Swan Lake in the day and climbed onto the mountain to gain a closer view of the bright moon at night.

"I enjoyed very much the day when we looked at the golden grassland surrounded by numerous mountains, and it seemed that we were also having a day of the idyllic life of local Kazkhstan herdsmen", said Wang Jianfeng, a tourist.

"And it is so peaceful sitting here to wait for the night to fall and the moon to shine", he added.

Many people in east Fujian Province chose to spend the day in Taiwan. Xiamen Travel Agency in Xiamen City alone organized more than 50 tourist groups to Taiwan for the holiday.

In Fuzhou, the provincial capital, about 40 percent of the group tours were Taiwan-bounded.

The Sun and Moon Lake in Taiwan was a good place to enjoy the full moon, said Jia Ronglin, general manager of Fujian Tourism Company. - Xinhua