As Mid-Autumn Festival nears, mooncakes make their annual return

Ding Shumin, a Beijing native in her 60s, stood at the counter of a pastry shop in Beijing, carefully selecting mooncakes. One for herself, another for a relative, a few for friends — and some for her grandson.

By the time she left the shop, Ding had packed about 20.

She could have chosen chocolate, durian and some other contemporary flavors. Instead, she stuck to the taste she has loved since childhood: wuren, a traditional filling made with nuts and seeds.

"When I was little, eating mooncakes was one of the things I looked forward to most at Mid-Autumn Festival," Ding said. "Wuren was always my favorite. Even now, I still have to buy some."

The packaging of the mooncakes invoked as much nostalgia as the taste. Five mooncakes were first bundled in brown kraft paper, then wrapped in bright red paper bearing the shop's name and the flavor in black calligraphy, before being tied with coarse twine. There was no elaborate gift box — just a humble wrapping that has survived from another era.

With Mid-Autumn Festival around the corner on Sept 25, old-fashioned mooncakes are a familiar sight in Beijing, and bakeries are competing for attention with their increasingly inventive flavors.

For Li Baozhi, who is in his 50s, has been in the trade for decades and now works with the pastry shop of Ya'er Liji, a time-honored halal food brand known for traditional Beijing flavors, the appeal of the traditional varieties lies in their simplicity.

Li began learning to make mooncakes when he was about 20 years old. He remembers the earliest versions as plain, firm and crumbly.

"The oldest style may have been made simply with sugar, oil and flour," Li said. "You put the mooncake into a square mold, pressed it flat, knocked it out of the mold and then baked it."

Today, Li makes traditional fillings including wuren, black sesame, red bean and jujube paste, which he said are most popular among buyers.

The pastry is also distinctly different from the soft, syrupy crust of Cantonese-style mooncakes.

"Cantonese-style mooncakes feature a lot of filling and thin skin, while Beijing-style ones have thicker, crispy skin and less filling," Li said.

Wuren, he added, is particularly popular among older customers.

But preserving tradition does not mean freezing it in time. "Although it is traditional, it still has to be improved. Otherwise, it won't work," he said.

For Li, mooncakes are part of the rhythm of everyday Chinese life — much like dumplings at Spring Festival and zongzi, or sticky rice dumplings, during Dragon Boat Festival.

A mooncake that costs just a few yuan can carry more meaning than an expensive gift box, he noted.

That down-to-earth quality may be precisely what gives traditional mooncakes staying power.

In the past, mooncakes were a precious seasonal treat because food was less abundant. Today, they have to compete with a seemingly endless menu of alternatives — including flavors that earlier generations could hardly have imagined.

"The sales were even stronger in the past, because there was less choice," Li said. "But now people have more options — you can eat mooncakes, or hairy crabs instead."

Yet the ritual has proved difficult to replace. At the bakery where customer Ding shopped, several thousand mooncakes are sold daily, according to Ding Shilong, the restaurant's culinary director. At the busiest point before the festival, sales can climb to 10,000 or even 20,000 pieces a day.

In nearby Qianmen, a historic district in central Beijing, 53-year-old Zhai Guangjun runs another traditional bakery tucked inside a hutong. He started selling mooncakes about a month before the festival, with most customers coming from the neighborhood.

For many, Zhai said, buying old-fashioned mooncakes is less about novelty than memory — a small edible link to childhood and to the annual promise of family reunions.

Mooncake fillings vary widely across China, from Beijing's traditional wuren and jujube pastes to Shanghai's savory fresh meat fillings and the rich lotus seed paste in Guangdong province.

The same tension between tradition and novelty plays out elsewhere in China too.

On Sept 8, Russian influencer Marina Maloy, who lives in Shanghai, posted a video of herself sampling mooncakes on Nanjing East Road. Alongside the city's classic fresh meat mooncakes, she tried newer versions flavored with fermented red bean curd sauce, shrimp and crab roe (the rich, golden substance found inside a crab).

After sampling her way through the mooncakes, Maloy said the experience gave her a glimpse of people's "respect for tradition and their love of life".