The Double Ninth Festival: a day with too much luck in it

Always the ninth of the ninth on the Chinese calendar, almost never the same western date twice. The lunar month runs new moon to new moon, so twelve of them fall short of the solar year and a whole extra month is added every two or three years to catch up; the festival keeps its lunar address and the Gregorian date swings by nearly a month around it. These dates are computed from the same engine that runs our calendar converter, and they run backward too, because a date this far from fixed gets looked up for old photographs as often as for next month's plans.

In the Book of Changes the number nine stands for yang: the unbroken line, the sun, heat, motion, the male. Six is its opposite. So a date on which the month is nine and the day is nine is a date with the volume turned all the way up, and the early Chinese view of anything turned all the way up was that it was about to tip over. Two nines on one date read as a warning.

The first person we can watch turn it into a blessing is an emperor writing a thank-you note. Around the year 218, Cao Pi, soon to be the first emperor of Wei, sent a bunch of chrysanthemums to his minister Zhong Yao with a letter. The years go by, he writes, and suddenly it is the ninth of the ninth again; nine is a yang number and the sun and moon both answer to it, so custom admires the name and takes it as fit for a long life, which is why people feast and gather on high ground. Then the point of the gift: in a month when every other plant has given up, the chrysanthemum alone is blooming, and nothing is better for strengthening the body and lengthening the years.

That is the whole festival in a paragraph, written eighteen hundred years ago: the doubled nine, the long-life reading of it, the high gathering, the flower. Cao Pi does not say why nine should mean long life, and he did not need to. The character for nine and the character for a long time are both pronounced jiǔ, and a Chinese speaker hearing "nine-nine" hears "long, long" in the same breath. That pun is the thread on which everything later hangs, up to and including the 2012 law. If you want the long-life idea in its own right, the longevity page reads it off the character.

The three things people do on the day come from a single sentence in a sixth-century collection of strange tales, the Xu Qixie Ji of Wu Jun. A scholar named Huan Jing has spent years studying under a master of the occult arts, Fei Changfang, who one day tells him: on the ninth of the ninth your household will meet with disaster. Leave at once. Have everyone in the family sew a red bag, fill it with dogwood and tie it to their arm; climb to high ground; drink chrysanthemum wine; and the calamity can be avoided. Huan Jing does exactly that. The family spends the day on a mountain and comes home in the evening to find the chickens, dogs, oxen and sheep all dead at once. "They took your place," says the master. And the book ends the story with a sentence that is practically a footnote: this, it says, is where the custom of climbing and drinking on the ninth, and of women wearing dogwood bags, comes from.

It is a good story, and like most origin stories it is younger than the thing it explains. The Xijing Zaji, which claims to record the Han palace of four centuries earlier, has a former maid of Emperor Gaozu's consort list the pleasures of the inner court, and among them: on the ninth of the ninth, wear dogwood, eat the seasonal cake, drink chrysanthemum wine, and it makes people long-lived. Whether that really is a memory of the second century BC or a later writer's idea of one, it puts all three customs together well before anyone had heard of Huan Jing, and without any disaster to avoid. The dogwood and the wine were there first. The story was fitted to them.

The dogwood itself deserves a word, because English readers picture the wrong tree. It is zhuyu, the Asiatic cornel, a shrub with narrow leaves and small oval red berries that ripen in the ninth month, and it stinks, agreeably, of something medicinal. That is the reason it was worn. The Fengtu Ji, a third-century gazetteer, says people broke off a sprig on this day and put it in their hair "to drive off bad air and hold off the first cold." The ninth month is when the weather turns and people start falling ill; a strong-smelling herb on your person was the sensible precaution of an age without much else. The red bag on the arm is the same idea in a sachet.

The wine is slower. The palace maid's account gives the recipe, and the recipe is the nicest thing on this page: when the chrysanthemums open, pick stems, leaves and flowers together, mix them into millet and start the ferment; it is ready the following ninth of the ninth, when you drink it and set the next batch going. Every Double Ninth cup was begun on the Double Ninth before, which means that for anyone keeping the custom, the festival has never actually ended. It is one long year-old brew.

If the customs come from one sentence, the feeling of the day comes from one poem, and it was written by a teenager. Wang Wei was seventeen and away from home when he wrote "Thinking of my brothers east of the mountains on the ninth day of the ninth month," and the four lines run, in plain sense: alone in a strange place, a stranger; at every festival I miss my family twice as much; I know that far away my brothers are climbing to the high place today, pinning on their dogwood, and one person is missing.

Every Chinese schoolchild learns it, and the second line, the one about missing your family twice as much at a festival, has come loose from the poem and become the thing people say about any holiday spent away from home. What is striking, if you have just read the Huan Jing story, is what the poem takes for granted. Nobody in it is avoiding a disaster. The climbing and the dogwood have become simply what a family does together on this day, and the danger the customs were invented against has been replaced by the only danger the poem cares about, which is being the one who is not there. That shift, from warding off harm to counting who is present, is the shift the festival made on its way to becoming a day about the old.

By the twelfth century the festival was a city holiday with its own fashions. Meng Yuanlao, remembering the lost capital of Kaifeng in the 1140s, lists five varieties of chrysanthemum the whole city turned out to admire, names the temples, bridges and mounds outside the walls where people went to picnic on high ground, and describes what they sent each other a day or two beforehand: steamed cakes of rice flour, stuck with little cut-paper flags and pressed with pomegranate seeds, chestnut, ginkgo and pine nuts.

That is the Chongyang cake, and it is still made in layers with a flag in the top. The name is a pun of the same kind as the nine. The word for cake, gāo, sounds like the word for high, so eating the cake counts as climbing, and the flag on top is the banner you would plant at the summit. It was, and is, the version of the festival for the very old and the very small, the people who cannot get up the hill, which is a strangely apt thing for a day that would end up belonging to the old.

The long-life reading was already eighteen centuries old when the state picked it up. From 1989, China began keeping the Double Ninth as a festival for the elderly, and the reason given in the press is the pun: nine-nine, jiǔ jiǔ, sounds like long-long, and a day the tradition already associated with living a long time was the obvious place to put a day honoring the people who had. It stayed a custom rather than a rule for another two decades. Then, on December 28, 2012, the National People's Congress revised the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly, and Article 12 of the new text is a single sentence: the ninth day of the ninth lunar month each year is Seniors' Day. It took effect on July 1, 2013.

In practice that means a working day on which the elderly are visited, taken out to lunch, given gifts, and, in a great many neighborhoods, organized into a group walk up the nearest hill, which brings the whole thing back to Huan Jing. Taiwan got there first, rededicating the day as Senior Citizens' Day in 1966. Hong Kong and Macau, where the festival is a public holiday under its Cantonese name, Chung Yeung, took a different fork: there the high place people climb to is the hillside cemetery, and the day is spent tidying the family graves, a second Qingming for the autumn.