Mid-Autumn Festival
01 · Historical Records
Chuseok (Qiuxi) was once the 'most important festival of the year' for the Korean people. The Korean ethnic group has passed this festival down from generation to generation, giving rise to a Mid-Autumn Festival custom of the Chinese Koreans with its own distinctive character. Among the Chinese Koreans, the Chuseok festival begins with ancestor worship and grave-sweeping. Chuseok retains the distinctive ethnic customs of the Korean people, while mutual understanding with other ethnic groups and the joint celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival have also gradually become a new trend.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
On the day of Chuseok, people first go to the graves to cut away the weeds growing on them, and then lay out offerings and hold the sacrifice. The Chuseok celebration is held with great ceremony: cattle are slaughtered and wine prepared; every household uses the newly harvested grain to make tteok (rice cakes) and songpyeon (pine-flavoured rice cakes); and traditional folk activities such as the swing, the plank jump and wrestling are held. The people of the community take part enthusiastically, and the festival lasts for several days.
Cutting the weeds at the graves
The first task of the day: the family clears the weeds from the graves, mends the soil and sets out offerings before burning incense.
Making rice cakes and pine cakes from the new harvest
Rice cakes and steamed cakes made from the new grain, pounded while it is still fresh, are the signature foods of the festival.
Swing and springboard
Swinging and springboard contests, set up at the village entrance and on the riverbank, are the main outdoor pastimes for the young.
Wrestling matches
Wrestling among the young men on a hastily leveled ground, with the winner toasted by the whole village.
Slaughtering the ox and preparing the feast
An ox is killed and shared among participating households, each family cooking its own portion for the feast that follows.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The distribution of Chuseok in Yanbian is mainly in the Korean-populated townships along the Tumen and Mudan rivers; many long-established households in the villages of Antu, Helong, Wangqing, Dunhua and Longjing have kept the festival for generations. Regional differences lie mainly in the standards of offerings and of hospitality: mountain villages, their farming ties being fixed, have the various households call on one another on the day of sacrifice, the slaughter of cattle and the preparation of wine being shared out by household — lively but laborious; families in the river valleys and on the city outskirts, by contrast, rely chiefly on tteok, songpyeon and brewed rice wine made from the year's new grain, with offerings kept simple and the rituals more concentrated instead. After the grave-sweeping comes the climax of the entertainments. The plank jumps and swings are set up in the open ground at the village entrance and on the river beaches, their height determined by the number of festival days and by the site; wrestling is mostly contested by young men in a temporarily levelled arena, and singing and dancing continue through the night. The Yanbian Culture and Art Research Centre (Yanbian Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Centre) undertakes the documentation and organisation of activities for this custom, compiling into texts and images the sacrificial prayers scattered among the people, the methods of making tteok and songpyeon, and the techniques of erecting swings and plank-jump frames.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Mid-Autumn Festival · Mid-Autumn Festival · Mid-Autumn Festival · Mid-Autumn Festival · Mid-Autumn Festival · Mid-Autumn Festival · Mid-Autumn Festival.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
In Yanbian, Chuseok simultaneously has a threefold identity: for the individual family, it is the occasion for ancestor worship and the compiling of genealogies; for the village, it is the setting for organising memorial feasts on the basis of clan and neighbourhood; and for national-level intangible cultural heritage protection, it is the most visible marker of Korean ethnic cultural identity in a region that is not an ethnic concentration area. The festival date falling close to the Mid-Autumn Festival has also brought a new fashion: the children celebrate on both sides, while on the same day the parents have school for some and gatherings for others, so the boundary between the two customs has grown blurred. This is not a loosening of the tradition itself, but a direct result of the arrangement of daily life — the schedules of schools, companies and relatives are crowded onto the same calendar, and all the elders of the community can do is hold fast to the few tasks of ancestor worship. Having lived intermingled with other ethnic groups in Yanbian for a long time, the Korean people's festival contents have gradually seeped into one another; on the day of Chuseok the occasion includes both the community's own sacrificial rites and exchanges with Han Chinese neighbours, which stands in contrast with the Chuseok preserved more completely in the ethnically concentrated Korean communities of the south.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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