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Letter from Hong Kong...

Think of it as Diwali without the fireworks: millions of lanterns will be lit across East Asia and South East Asia as the region celebrates a 3,000-year festival to give thanks for familial prosperity and togetherness.

The Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival, as it's called, marks the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, and is one of the two most important festivals for the Chinese people.

In an earlier era, it was the day when farmers celebrated the end of summer harvesting, but in more modern times it's just an occasion to celebrate, say, a 'killing' on the stock market.

It's customary for families to get together, gaze at the mid-autumn 'harvest' moon, and eat yuebing (mooncakes), a Chinese pastry made of lotus paste and the yok of salted duck eggs. It tastes about as ghastly as it sounds, and to my simple mind it appears that being forced to feed on mooncakes is a severe test of familial bonds. But the lantern displays, at public parks and neighbourhoods, make for quite an enchanting sight…

It's also customary for Chinese people to exchange gifts of mooncakes during the festival. But as in India, where Diwali 'gifts' have become a veneer for bribes to bureaucratic babus and other masters of human destiny, in China gifts of ostentatious mooncakes to 'comrades' can grease the tracks of life.

How, you may well wonder, can lotus-paste pastry make for chai-pani material? The answer is in the 'packaging'. A box of mooncakes may be gifted with elaborate accessories such as a bottle of expensive wine or diamond jewellery. But on occasion, the stakes get considerably higher.

A few years ago, a confectionery company offered a mooncake 'set' - which included a digital camera, a video camera, alcohol, a pen, a lighter and a (I kid you not!) a 1000 sq ft apartment - for $40,000! Authorities in Beijing were compelled to issue directives to do away with expensive gift-giving at festival time.

But they probably realise by now that it's probably easier to put a man on the moon than to stop the timeless practice of 'mooncake'-gifting.

Forbes magazine's Asia editor Robyn Meredith gave a luncheon-talk at Hong Kong's stately Foreign Correspondents' Club to promote her new book The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us.

"Since a lot of you must be overly familiar with China, I'll talk rather more about India," she said, and went on to familiarise the audience with the "trundling elephant". After the talk, inscribing a copy of her book for me, Meredith said: "I hope you'll find in the book an India that's familiar to you." I'm only halfway through her book, but I can assure
her I do.