Double Ninth Festival

Festival date and customs

Double Ninth falls on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month. Its Mandarin name is Chongyang Jie (重阳节); in Hong Kong, the Cantonese name Chung Yeung is widely used. Chongyang means a doubling of yang. Odd numbers are classified as yang in traditional numerical symbolism, so the two nines give the day its name.

Climbing to a height, enjoying chrysanthemums and remembering ancestors are familiar expressions of the occasion. The autumn outing can be a walk into the hills or a gathering at an elevated viewpoint. In Hong Kong, visits to ancestral graves are also prominent, bringing remembrance and time outdoors into the same season.

A famous explanation of climbing appears in Wu Jun’s Xu Qixie Ji, a collection of supernatural tales from the Liang period. Huan Jing is warned by his teacher Fei Changfang that disaster will strike on the ninth day of the ninth month. He takes his family uphill, carrying red bags of zhuyu, an aromatic plant, and drinking chrysanthemum wine as instructed. On returning, they find their domestic animals dead in their place. The protective legend brings several festival customs into a single story of a family escaping danger.

Chrysanthemums, cakes and longevity

Chrysanthemums are a distinctive flower of the autumn festival. In the Northern Song capital, wine shops decorated their entrances with them, and people went outside the city to feast at elevated sites. Steamed cakes were exchanged as gifts, decorated with small coloured flags and fruit or nut toppings. Flowers, outings and food formed a shared seasonal celebration.

Cake has a verbal association with climbing. In Mandarin, gao, “cake,” sounds like gao, “high.” Sharing a cake can therefore express wishes for advancement as well as recalling the custom of ascending to a height. Chrysanthemum wine carries associations of longevity, and the flowers themselves appear in festival displays.

Respect for older people is a prominent modern theme of Chongyang. Visits, meals and outings with elders give the annual date a family focus. The wish for long life becomes an opportunity to spend time together and recognise the place of older generations in the household and community.

Ancestral gatherings

Where Double Ninth is a grave-visiting occasion, families tend burial places and make offerings to deceased relatives. Extended families or lineages may organise a collective visit, followed by the sharing of food. Such gatherings can bring together people who no longer live in the same neighbourhood or village.

The remembrance is seasonal rather than tied to one person’s death anniversary. It allows relatives to honour several generations together and pass on knowledge of family relationships and burial places. Hill climbing, care for the living and remembrance of the dead give Chongyang different emphases in different communities.