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Double Ninth Festival
Chongyang: climb a hill, look at chrysanthemums and drink chrysanthemum wine for a long life.
What happens
The ninth day of the ninth lunar month is the Chongyang or Double Ninth Festival. The old customs are to climb to a high place, to wear a sprig of the zhuyu plant against harm, and to admire chrysanthemums, which flower in the ninth month and stand for long life. People drink chrysanthemum wine or tea. Parks across China hold chrysanthemum shows in these weeks. In mainland China the day is also Seniors' Day, and in Hong Kong families visit ancestral graves.
The flowers
Original text by the Phool desk, written with AI assistance. Background: "Double Ninth Festival" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from family to family and place to place. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Chrysanthemum: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GFDL 1.2, source
- Japanese cornel: Philipp Franz von Siebold and Joseph Gerhard Zuccarini, Public domain, source
- Chrysanthemum tea: by gliuoo, CC BY-SA 2.0, source