Chung Yeung Festival (重陽節): The Double-Ninth Day Hong Kong Climbs Its Mountains and Visits Its Ancestors

On the ninth day of the ninth lunar month — 19 October this year — Hong Kong goes outside. The MTR carriages running toward the New Territories fill with families carrying folding chairs, incense bundles and boxes of flowers. Hikers in bright jackets fill the trails up Lion Rock, Dragon's Back and Tai Mo Shan. Grandchildren follow their fathers up hillside paths with roast suckling pig, rice wine and chrysanthemum tea packed into bags. This is Chung Yeung Festival (重陽節, cung4 joeng4 zit3) — the Double Ninth — and it is one of the oldest reasons Hong Kongers still climb mountains with their dead relatives on their minds.

A festival older than most Chinese dynasties

Chung Yeung's roots run back to the Han dynasty — well over 2,000 years ago. The classical Chinese cosmology that gives the festival its name is simple: in the I Ching, nine is a yang number — the strongest of the odd (yang) numbers. The ninth day of the ninth month doubles that yang. "Double ninth" (重九) is a day of extreme yang energy, and the ancient Chinese believed it had to be balanced carefully, usually by going up — up a mountain, up a hill, up anywhere high — to let the excess energy disperse into open sky.

Legend attaches the practice to a Han dynasty folk hero called Huan Jing (桓景). A sage warned Huan Jing that disaster would fall on his village on the ninth day of the ninth month. Climb a mountain with your family, the sage told him. Carry a dogwood bough. Drink chrysanthemum wine. Do not come home until the sun sets. Huan Jing did exactly that. When his family descended, the folk tale says, they discovered their village had been struck by plague while they were up on the hilltop — and only those who climbed survived.

Hong Kong has kept the climb-the-mountain practice ever since. Carry food. Carry wine. Carry your ancestors in your head. Come down at sunset.

The two things every Hong Kong family does on Chung Yeung

Even families who do not believe in anything about the yang cosmology do two things on this day — the Chung Yeung double act.

1. Climb a hill (登高, dang1 gou1). Lion Rock, Dragon's Back, The Peak, Tai Mo Shan, Ma On Shan — all packed. Hong Kong is roughly three-quarters mountains and country parks, so the city has never had to invent artificial places for this. Even a short climb up the hill behind your estate counts.

2. Visit the ancestral graves (拜山, baai3 saan1). Chung Yeung is one of the two major grave-sweeping days in Cantonese tradition — the other is Ching Ming in spring. Families bring the ancestral graves clean of weeds, replace the dried flowers with fresh chrysanthemums, lay out a roast pig or roast chicken, pour rice wine, burn joss paper, and bow three times. In Hong Kong's hillside cemeteries like Pok Fu Lam, Chai Wan and Cheung Chau, the whole hillside fills with smoke by mid-morning.

The Hong Kong government recognises Chung Yeung as a public holiday every year specifically so the entire city can go up its hills together.

The food of the Double Ninth

The traditional Chung Yeung foods are specifically the ones you can carry up a mountain and share.

重陽糕 Chung Yeung cake (cung4 joeng4 gou1). A steamed rice-flour cake, often nine layers tall (one for each yang), usually decorated with chopped nuts, red dates, candied fruit and sometimes a small paper flag at the top. The word for cake (糕) is a homophone for the word for "high" (高), so eating it on the day of the climb is a word-play blessing — you ascend.

Chrysanthemum tea (菊花茶, guk1 faa1 caa4). Cooling, floral, slightly bitter. Classical Chinese medicine considers it to balance yang excess, which makes it the exact drink for the exact day. Hong Kongers drink it year-round at a dim sum table, but on Chung Yeung it carries meaning.

Roast suckling pig or roast chicken. For the grave-sweeping, not the hike. Carried up to the family tomb, offered to the ancestors, then eaten by the family on the way back down. The classic Hong Kong New Territories grave-sweeping meal — a siu mei spread on a tomb's stone offering table — is one of the most Cantonese sights you will ever see.

A Cantonese phrase that explains Chung Yeung in four characters

If you want one Cantonese phrase that captures the energy of Chung Yeung Festival, this is it:

Chung Yeung in the diaspora

For Cantonese kids outside Hong Kong, Chung Yeung is one of the hardest festivals to carry overseas. You cannot easily visit your great-grandfather's grave in Toishan from Toronto. You cannot easily climb Lion Rock from Sydney. But the family instinct carries — the Vancouver diaspora family that goes hiking in Stanley Park on the second Sunday of October is observing Chung Yeung without necessarily knowing it, and the San Francisco Cantonese family that puts chrysanthemums on a family altar on a Saturday morning is doing the same observance in a different hemisphere.

The festival asks something simple of you: go up today, remember your people, come back down. If you are far from Hong Kong, go up any hill you can find. Our Cotton Tree Flower hoodie was built for exactly that kind of morning — the Guangdong flower on cotton, warm enough for an autumn hike, worn by someone remembering where they came from.

For the day itself, carry chrysanthemum tea. If you are in Hong Kong, book the MTR to Fanling or Sheung Shui by 8 a.m. — grave hillsides fill fast. If you are abroad, call your parents. 2,000 years of ancestors did the same walk you are about to do.