misbehave/CC BY 2.0īut what are mooncakes? Often described as a cultural equivalent to Western holiday fruitcake, mooncakes are a seasonal dessert bought by millions of Chinese families to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Modern mooncakes for sale in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Still, the story is often repeated as fact, or as an unverified-but-probably-true story that somehow escapes the “orthodox” histories. But almost everything else in this amalgamation of stories, from the thumbs to the messages to the mooncakes, is entirely untrue. We do know that the Mongols ruled over the Han Chinese, and that, over multiple decades in the second half of the 14th century, there was an uprising that led to Zhu Yuanzhang seizing control and establishing the Ming Dynasty. “It’s preposterous,” he writes, “to cast as the instigator of the uprising and credit him with the plan to conceal the messages calling for rebellion in the filling of mooncakes.” Public DomainĪll these stories, collated by the late scholar of Chinese history Hok-Lam Chan, are just stories. A 14th-century Yuan Dynasty painting shows a high-ranking Mongol woman ascending a horse. No, wait, no message whatsoever-just the power of rumor, whispered from household to household. Was it definitely mooncakes? It might have been instructions on medicine sold door-to-door. Maybe the message had been coded, and assembled by combining multiple mooncakes. Another says that the message read, less poetically, ‘‘Kill the Tartars on New Year’s Eve!’ (The Mongols did not read Chinese, and so remained in the dark about the mooncake messages.) Or perhaps the message was written on the rice-paper placed under the cakes. Take action on the midnight hour, let us kill the housekeeping masters all together!” And so they did, on the night of the Moon Festival, and so the Chinese were liberated.Īt least, that’s one version of the story. In each one, it is said, they slipped a piece of paper that said: “The spiritual illuminaries are hidden in the darkness, they are secretly helping people to defreeze the icy cold. Liu sent men to every corner of the three prefectures under Mongol rule, where each visited pastry shops and filed orders for millions and millions of mooncakes. A 17th-century portrait of Liu Bowen, also known as Liu Ji, by Gu Jianlong. The Mid-Autumn Festival was approaching, the time when every family would traditionally exchange and eat pastries called mooncakes. Liu was a poet and philosopher-and a remarkable strategist. However, he had a brilliant friend, Liu Bowen, to aid his rise to prominence and power. Zhu Yuanzhang, the man who would one day be emperor of China’s Ming Dynasty, was then a young man born to a desperately poor Han Chinese peasant family. A Mongol law demanded the thumbs of all Chinese boys to be mutilated at birth so they would be incapable of drawing a bow.īy 1368, the stories continue, the time was ripe for an uprising. Young sons were molested, daughters were violently “deflowered” before their weddings. Spies were even stationed in each house, while famine and poverty scratched at the door.Īnd there were worse abuses, or so the stories say. Mongol guards were everywhere, keeping an eye on that potentially nefarious chopper. Possessing weapons was out, too, even meat and vegetable cleavers, which were rationed-one for every ten families. Due to fears about uprisings, the Han couldn’t meet in groups. Every aspect of their lives was at the mercy of their Mongol rulers who were, mostly, not terribly merciful. CC0Īfter 88 years under Mongol rule, the spirits of Han Chinese families were at an all-time low. High-end modern mooncakes in a special gift box.
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