The first day of the tenth lunar month is the Hanyi Festival (“Winter Clothing Festival”), a Chinese traditional festival with a long history. In folk tradition it is grouped with Qingming in the third month and the Zhongyuan Festival in the seventh month as the three great festivals of remembrance for the dead. At Hanyi, people prepare incense, candles and joss paper in advance to make offerings to their ancestors. But what exactly is the Hanyi Festival, and what does it mean?
The first day of the tenth lunar month — commonly called the “autumn memorial” or “Winter Clothing Festival” — is, alongside Qingming and the Zhongyuan Festival, one of China’s three great festivals of remembrance. The Book of Songs records, “In the seventh month the Fire Star declines; in the ninth month clothes are handed out,” meaning that as the weather turns cold, people should provide warm clothing for their departed loved ones — which is why the first of the tenth month is also called the “Clothing-Bestowing Festival.”
The first day of the tenth lunar month is one of China’s three memorial festivals. Unlike Qingming in spring and the Zhongyuan Festival in autumn, however, besides burning joss paper for the departed, because it falls on the first day of deep winter — and just as the living add clothing against the cold, they think of the dead’s need for warmth too — the traditional Hanyi Festival also involves sending “winter clothing” made of five-coloured paper, to express remembrance of ancestors.
The custom of eating noodles at Hanyi has a long history. Noodles are one of China’s most popular traditional foods, with an ancient lineage. The earliest “noodles” could hardly be called “strands”: people simply rolled dough into a cake and boiled it, calling it “boiled cake,” “water-mixed cake” or “soup jade.” Because its cooking method and ingredients resembled today’s water-rinsed and hot-soup noodles, we still regard it as the forerunner of noodles. By the Jin dynasty, “boiled cake” was also called “soup cake.”