Chung Yeung Festival
Next: October 8, 2027
Climb high, and remember your elders.
The story
Where it comes from
Chung Yeung (重阳, Chongyang in Mandarin), the Double Ninth Festival, falls on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month. Nine was counted a yang number, and on this date it appears twice. Legend says that in the Han dynasty the teacher Fei Changfang told his pupil Huan Jing to take his family up a hill that day, with chrysanthemum wine. When they came home they found their livestock dead, a disaster the family had escaped. Because jiujiu, 'nine nine', sounds like 'for a long time', the day also became one for wishing long life.
How it's celebrated
People climb hills, admire chrysanthemums, drink chrysanthemum wine and wear or carry zhuyu (dogwood), said to keep bad luck away. In Hong Kong and Macau the day is a public holiday, and whole families visit ancestral graves, many of them on hillsides, to clean them and lay out offerings. In mainland China it is also Seniors' Day, when younger relatives take older ones out for the day and make time for them.
Did you know
- The Tang poet Wang Wei wrote the best-known lines about the day, picturing his brothers climbing the hills wearing zhuyu, with one person missing: himself, far from home.
- China first named the day a festival for older people in 1989, and since 2013 it has been Seniors' Day by law.
- In Malaysia and Singapore the ninth day of the ninth month is also the climax of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, when devotees dressed in white send the deities off by the sea.
The greeting
重阳安康 · Chóngyáng ānkāng
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