Chongqing - The Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional festival to celebrate the autumn harvest and family reunion. On September 18^th, the 2021 Mid-Autumn Festival Activity of Laowai @ Chongqing was held at Yunlintianxiang Tourist Attraction of Ba’nan District. Thirty-three ex-pats from 20 countries attended this event. Some of them work at consulate generals in Chongqing like the Consulate General of Cambodia and the Consulate General of Canada; some are teachers and students from universities in Chongqing like Chongqing University and the Chongqing University of Technology. At the event, ex-pats celebrated the Chinese traditional festival with local people by making mooncakes, learning intangible cultural heritages, and touring the idyllic countryside.

Making Mooncakes to savor authentic Chinese taste

“Pressing the pastry into a thin one with your palm and put the fillings in.” The chefs were teaching ex-pats and local people to make mooncakes at the event.

“Ba’nan Silver Needle Tea is Ban’nan’s special tea. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, we have developed tea-flavored mooncakes. Today we also bring tea ingredients and related skills here and teach our ex-pats and local people to make tea-flavored mooncakes with special Ba’nan tea products.” One person from the organizer said.

Apart from making mooncakes, there were other rich activities like pasting pictures with harvested crops, rolling pumpkins, and so forth.

Vitalii from Ukraine, who has worked in Chongqing for three years, said, “My Chinese friends will go back home and get reunified with their families every Mid-Autumn Festival. This year I attend this festival, and I experience the charm of the Mid-Autumn festival myself.”

Learning Kungfu with Chinese masters

At the event, ex-pats can experience local intangible culture heritages like Mudong Folk Songs and Jiangjia Dragon Dance from Chinese masters. At the same time, intangible cultures like dough figurines, paper-cuttings, sugar paintings, Wangshi Fire Moxibustion from other districts were also put on display.

All of these ex-pats were very interested in these traditional cultural items. Some of them even staged a show to demonstrate what they had learned from Chinese masters. Some ex-pats received rewards from their paper-cutting works, dough figurines, clay figurines, and so forth.

Touring the idyllic countryside

Ex-pats also visited the Yunlintianxiang Tourist Attraction and enjoyed the beautiful countryside of Ba’nan. As a demonstrative area for integrating agriculture, culture, and tourism, Yunlintianxiang Tourist Attraction is famous for its sea of flowers in high mountains. In 2020, it received 500,000 visits and achieved a rural tourism revenue of 13million yuan.

What’s worth mentioning is that reporters from iChongqing live-streamed the whole activity. If you are interested, you can visit the Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook channels of iChongqing.