Tết Trung Thu (Mid-Autumn Festival)

The children’s festival

Tết Trung Thu is regarded as the second most important festival in Vietnam after Tết, and is often called the Children’s Festival. Traditionally, children were thought to be the most innocent and the closest to the sacred and natural beauty of the world. In its oldest form the evening honoured the dragon who brings rain for the crops, and people watched the moon to divine the future of the harvest. Prayers for fertility slowly became a celebration of children, and by the early twentieth century in Hanoi it had become the children’s festival above all.

Under the full moon, children parade in the dark with lanterns of many shapes and colours, and wear masks — once of papier-mâché, now more often plastic. Handcrafted shadow lanterns, often showing figures from Vietnamese history, have been part of the festival since the Lý dynasty in the twelfth century, although mass-produced lanterns have largely replaced them.

Legends, lions and food

Besides the story of Chang’e, known in Vietnam as Hằng Nga, two tales belong to this night. One tells of Cuội, who was carried to the moon clinging to a sacred banyan tree; children light lanterns to show him the way home. The other is of a carp who worked all year to turn into a dragon.

Lion dances are an important part of the festival. Children’s groups and professional troupes perform in the streets and go from house to house asking permission to dance; if the host agrees, the lion dances inside as a blessing and receives lucky money in return. Cakes and fruit are arranged into elaborate displays — rice dough moulded into animals, pomelo segments shaped into rabbits or dogs.