Singapore Mid Autumn Festival Sept 2015

Full Album Here: Singapore Mid Autumn Festival Sept 2015

The Mid Autumn festival for the Chinese is a traditional harvest festival, which is something along the lines of Thanksgiving in North America where families get together, be thankful for the good things granted to them over the past year and generally hope that the harvest next year will be as bountiful.

In Singapore, the festival is more generally associated with the carrying of lanterns (usually by children) and the consumption of mooncakes. The seriousness of the mooncake quest is not to be underestimated, with Singaporeans paying good money for these typically baked confections filled with diabetes-inducing sweet pastes inlaid with salted egg yolks (which represent the moon). The more popular interpretation of the festival in Singapore involves the story of Chang E drinking the elixir of immortality under duress and flying to the moon, thereby perpetrating one of the world’s earliest moon landing hoaxes.

I do have personal memories of the lantern festival as it is popularly known here, but it typically involved fire and the gleeful incineration of the past year’s school notes. Sure, it was not great for the carbon footprint, but darn if it was not cathartic. Food and fire aside, Singapore also has a longstanding tradition of lantern installations along the roads in the Chinatown area (of which this is the final weekend). This year, Chinatown seems to be rolling with the SG50 brand, to mark Singapore’s 50 years of nationhood.

More recently, the Gardens by the Bay have taken this tradition up as well, with typically gargantuan installations. There is certainly something to be said for massive floating lanterns reflecting off the water and surrounding the Supertrees. It is probably only surpassed by masses of floating lanterns (which, incidentally, are disallowed in Singapore due to air traffic safety concerns).