Traditional mooncakes hold their ground as Mid-Autumn Festival nears

Ding Shumin, a woman in her sixties from Beijing, walked into a pastry shop in mid-September with a clear mission. She left with about twenty mooncakes—one for herself, another for a relative, several for friends, and some for her grandson. She had passed over the chocolate varieties, the durian options, all the contemporary flavors now crowding bakery shelves. Instead, she chose wuren, the traditional filling of nuts and seeds that she has preferred since childhood. "When I was little, eating mooncakes was one of the things I looked forward to most at Mid-Autumn Festival," she said. "Wuren was always my favorite. Even now, I still have to buy some."

The mooncakes she selected came wrapped in brown kraft paper, then in bright red paper printed with the shop's name and flavor in black calligraphy, tied with coarse twine. No elaborate gift box. Just humble wrapping that has outlasted decades.

With the Mid-Autumn Festival arriving on September 25, Beijing's bakeries are in full competition, each trying to capture attention with increasingly inventive flavors. Yet the traditional varieties hold steady. Li Baozhi, a man in his fifties who has worked in the trade for decades at Ya'er Liji, a time-honored halal food brand known for traditional Beijing flavors, sees the appeal of the old styles in their simplicity. He began learning to make mooncakes around age twenty. The earliest versions he remembers were plain, firm, and crumbly—made simply with sugar, oil, and flour, pressed into a square mold, knocked out, and baked. Today, Li makes traditional fillings including wuren, black sesame, red bean, and jujube paste, which he says are most popular with buyers. The pastry itself differs sharply from Cantonese-style mooncakes: Beijing versions have thicker, crispy skin and less filling, while Cantonese varieties feature thin skin and abundant filling. Wuren, Li notes, is particularly popular among older customers.

Preserving tradition does not mean freezing it in time, Li believes. "Although it is traditional, it still has to be improved. Otherwise, it won't work," he said. For him, mooncakes are part of the rhythm of Chinese life—as essential as dumplings at Spring Festival or sticky rice dumplings during Dragon Boat Festival. A mooncake costing just a few yuan can carry more meaning than an expensive gift box.

That down-to-earth quality may be what gives traditional mooncakes their staying power. In the past, mooncakes were precious because food was scarce. Today, they compete with an endless menu of alternatives—hairy crabs, modern desserts, flavors earlier generations could not 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 Ding shopped, several thousand mooncakes sell daily, according to Ding Shilong, the restaurant's culinary director. At peak season before the festival, sales can reach ten thousand to twenty thousand pieces a day.

In Qianmen, a historic district in central Beijing, fifty-three-year-old Zhai Guangjun runs a traditional bakery inside a hutong. He started selling mooncakes about a month before the festival, with most customers from the neighborhood. For many, buying old-fashioned mooncakes is less about novelty than memory—a small edible link to childhood and to the annual promise of family reunions.

The tension between tradition and novelty plays out across all of China. Mooncake fillings vary widely: Beijing's wuren and jujube pastes, Shanghai's savory fresh meat fillings, Guangdong's rich lotus seed paste. On September 8, Russian influencer Marina Maloy, who lives in Shanghai, posted a video sampling mooncakes on Nanjing East Road. Alongside the city's classic fresh meat varieties, she tried newer versions flavored with fermented red bean curd sauce, shrimp, and crab roe. After working through the selection, Maloy said the experience gave her a glimpse of people's "respect for tradition and their love of life."