A Brief History of Mooncakes

For those who don’t celebrate Mid Autumn Festival, you’d probably know mooncakes as the tasty cake the nice neighbour Aunty gives your family during the ‘mooncake festival’.
Mooncakes and the festival behind it are actually steeped in history and tradition that’s really very interesting. Here are some facts for you to impress your peers (and that same Aunty) if the conversation steers toward the upcoming festivities.

How mooncakes showed up in the picture has its roots in the late Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368 AD). Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644 AD) united the rebel forces of their time and planned for an uprising. Local counselor Liu Bowen came up with the great idea of hiding notes bearing “Uprise on the night of August 15th” in mooncakes to avoid the detection of their secret messages. The success of the uprising that followed made Zhu so delighted that he awarded his loyal subjects with mooncakes during the following Mid-Autumn Festival, and it has become a tradition to eat them ever since.