The Double Ninth Festival: A Chinese Holiday for Older Generations

Nearly every festival on the Chinese calendar is about one of four things: a harvest, a family reunion, driving off bad luck, or remembering someone who died.

One of them is about growing old. And it treats that as something worth celebrating.

The Double Ninth Festival falls on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, usually in October. It is not the biggest holiday in China, and outside the country it is barely known. But of everything on the calendar, it is the one with the most to say to readers of this site.

Two Nines, and a Pun About Longevity

The name explains itself once you know one fact about Chinese numbers.

Odd numbers are yang — bright, active, masculine. Even numbers are yin. Nine is the largest single-digit yang number, so the ninth day of the ninth month is a day of doubled yang: chong yang, the Double Ninth.

That would be enough to name a festival. But there is a second layer, and it is the one that gives the holiday its character. In Chinese, the sound of “double nine” (九九, jiu jiu) is identical to the sound of “long lasting” (久久, jiu jiu). The date itself is a wish for a long life.

So the festival was dedicated to longevity long before anybody made it official. The whole holiday grows out of a pun — which is extremely Chinese, and rather charming.

Four Things People Do

Climb a hill. This is the central activity, and the one the festival’s Chinese name — Chongyang Jie, the climbing festival to many people — comes closest to describing. The traditional explanation involves avoiding misfortune on a dangerous day. The practical one is better. Early autumn has the best weather of the year, and going up somewhere to look down at the landscape is a very good way to spend it.

Look at chrysanthemums. The chrysanthemum blooms in autumn, when most flowers are finished, and it became the flower of late life, endurance and quiet dignity in Chinese poetry. It is bound up with the poet Tao Yuanming, who is said to have grown them and written about them more than anyone. Some cities hold chrysanthemum displays for the festival.

Wear or hang zhuyu. Zhuyu is a small aromatic shrub, and the old custom was to wear a sprig or hang it on the door. Its strong smell was understood to keep bad influences out. The practice has faded more than the others, but it survives in the poetry — including the most quoted lines about this festival.

Eat double ninth cake. A layered cake, often with nuts and dried fruit, and usually called chongyang gao. The word for cake (糕, gao) sounds exactly like the word for height (高, gao), so eating the cake is a wordplay substitute for climbing the hill. This is the same logic that runs through Chinese food customs everywhere, and one of the reasons the seasonal eating traditions are so specific about what appears when.

The Holiday That Was Given to Older People

Here is the fact that makes the Double Ninth Festival unusual.

In 1989, the Chinese government designated the festival as Laoren Jie — the Day of Older People, or Seniors’ Day. In 2012, a law on the rights of older persons formally established it as the national day for older people. Since then, the festival has carried two identities at once: an old autumn custom about hills and flowers, and a modern occasion for honouring the elderly.

The combination is not seamless, and it is worth saying so. On any given October, you will see both genuine warmth and formal apparatus. Families make a point of visiting grandparents, and communities organise lunches. There are also public events, volunteers at care homes, and gift boxes distributed for photographs.

That is what a folk festival looks like after a state gives it a second job. Part celebration, part ceremony, and the two do not always fit together neatly.

But the underlying gesture is rare enough to be worth noticing. Most societies treat ageing as a problem to be managed. This holiday treats it as a stage of life deserving respect. A culture that writes that into its calendar has made a public statement about how it wants to see its older people.

Wang Wei’s Line About Missing Someone

The festival’s most famous poem was written by Wang Wei, at the age of seventeen, while he was away from home.

There is a line in it that behaves almost like an idiom in Chinese. It is quoted whenever somebody cannot get home for a family occasion: on every festival, we miss our people twice as much. The poem ends with an image of his brothers climbing a hill back home — and one person missing from the group with the sprigs of zhuyu in their hair.

The last line is the one that lasts: the brothers are together, and he is the gap in the picture.

Poets in China wrote about absence for the same reason they wrote about age — because it was ordinary, and because the language was already there for it. Our selection of classical poems about aging and solitude runs along the same lines.

How to Mark It

The holiday translates more easily than most. Four options, in ascending order of effort.

• Go up somewhere. A hill, a tower, a tall building with a viewing floor. The festival’s basic instruction is “get above the landscape while the weather is good”.
• Notice a flower that blooms out of season. The chrysanthemum is the festival’s symbol because it flowers in autumn. Something in your own climate does the same job.
• Eat something with a pun in it. A cake, ideally layered. Or skip the wordplay and have tea and something sweet — the sweetness is allowed either way.
• Write to someone older than you. A letter rather than a message. This is the modern version of the festival’s second identity, and it is the part that costs something.

There is a fifth option, for readers who are themselves in the older generation. Chinese tradition on this day offers a fairly direct permission: be honoured for a day, and let people do something for you. Many people find that harder than the hill.

Common Questions

Is this a public holiday? Not a national day off. It is widely observed as a cultural occasion, and if it falls on a weekend the hills outside Chinese cities get busy.

What exactly is zhuyu? A shrub of the genus Tetradium, with a strong scent, traditionally worn on this day. Dried sprigs are still sold in some markets in October.

Does the festival have religious content? The customs are folk practices and, later, a civic occasion about older people. There is no religious observance attached to it.

Why is the chrysanthemum connected with older age? Because it blooms in autumn, when the showy flowers are gone. Chinese poetry reads that as dignity and persistence rather than decline — a reading worth borrowing.

Can I mark it without a hill or a cake? Easily. The festival’s real subject is respect for people who have been around longer than we have. A phone call does that job.

A Day That Says Ageing Is Not a Problem

The Double Ninth Festival survives for a simple reason. It is the only day on a very full calendar that looks directly at getting older. And it decided, a thousand years before anyone started selling solutions for it, that the subject was worth celebrating rather than fixing.

Go up a hill in October if you have one nearby. Eat something round or layered, notice a flower that waited for autumn, and write to somebody older than yourself.

If you are the older person in that exchange, the festival’s instruction is different. Let them. That is what the day is for. And if the long view is what you are after, the seasonal calendar underneath all of these holidays is in the 24 solar terms. More of this tradition lives in our Culture & Arts section.