Mid-Autumn Festival at HLK: Bobing with Ghana Guests

In late September 2026, the management team at Quanzhou Honglinkai New Material Co., Ltd. (HLK) sat down with their families for Mid-Autumn Festival. Two clients who had travelled from Ghana were at the same table.

Mid-Autumn is one of the four great traditional festivals of China, and in 2026 it fell on 25 September — the fifteenth day of the eighth month on the Chinese lunar calendar. It is the night the moon is full, and the one festival of the year that is entirely about being together.

What Mid-Autumn Festival actually means

The festival is older than its name. Its earliest form was the moon sacrifice held around the autumn equinox in ancient China: people made offerings to the moon, gave thanks for the harvest and asked for the year ahead to go well.

By the Tang dynasty, moon-viewing had become a popular habit and Mid-Autumn turned into a festival the whole country kept. In the Song dynasty it spread through the towns — moon-viewing, lanterns, river trips and mooncakes. By the Ming and Qing dynasties the customs had settled into roughly the shape they still have, and the central idea had hardened into the one that survives today: reunion.

Everything about the festival points the same way. The moon is round, so the family should be whole. Mooncakes are round for the same reason. Su Shi was writing about exactly this in 1076, in a poem every Chinese schoolchild still learns — may we all be blessed with longevity; though a thousand miles apart, we still share the same moon.

That is also why the festival is a public holiday in China. Since 2008 people have been given the day off specifically so they can travel home. A country of internal migration stops for one evening and eats dinner with its parents.

One footnote for anyone reading the calendar: the moon is not always fullest on the fifteenth. The full moon can land on the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth or even seventeenth, which is why Chinese has a saying — the moon of the sixteenth is rounder than the fifteenth. The festival date is fixed by the calendar; the astronomy does what it likes.

The southern Fujian version: bobing

HLK is in Quanzhou, in the south of Fujian. Mid-Autumn here has an extra layer that most of China does not have, and it is the loudest part of the evening.

It is called bobing — literally “gambling for cakes”, sometimes translated as the mooncake dice game. You need three things: six dice, a deep red porcelain bowl, and a set of sixty-three mooncakes called a hui bing.

The sixty-three cakes come in six grades, and the names are borrowed from the imperial examination rankings. From the top down:

Grade	Name	Cakes
1	状元 — top scholar	1
2	对堂 — second in the hall	2
3	三红 — three reds	4
4	四进 — fourth graduate	8
5	二举 — second degree	16
6	一秀 — first degree	32

Players take turns throwing all six dice into the bowl, anticlockwise around the table. One die showing a red four wins a 一秀 cake. Two red fours win a 二举. Three red fours win a 三红. Four of a kind, provided they are not fours, wins a 四进. All six faces from one to six in a single throw wins a 对堂. Four red fours makes you the 状元 — the top scholar — and the title keeps climbing from there: five of a kind is 五子登科, and the highest throw of all, four red fours with two red ones, is 状元插金花.

The 状元 cake is the size of the moon it is named after — roughly twenty centimetres across, usually stamped with Chang’e flying skyward or the jade rabbit beneath the osmanthus tree.

The winner wears the 状元 hat, as in the photograph above, and takes the red packet. It is a costume for one night, and it is the whole point.

There are two stories about where bobing came from. One places it in the seventeenth-century encampment of Zheng Chenggong, where a general invented the game so that soldiers far from home would have something to look forward to at Mid-Autumn. The other traces it to zhuangyuan chou, a game of luck that students played while hoping to pass the imperial examinations. Either way, the game carries a quiet joke: the examination it borrowed its ranks from was built on elimination, but bobing is built so that everybody wins something. Anyone at that table can be the top scholar. Nobody has to actually sit the exam.

That may be why it lasted. Xiamen’s Mid-Autumn bobing was listed as intangible cultural heritage in Fujian in 2005; in 2008 the game entered the national list; in 2022 Quanzhou’s own Minnan bobing custom was added to Fujian’s seventh provincial heritage list. It is played across southern Fujian and Taiwan, China, and by Minnan communities that carried it to Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. For a great many people it is the sound of Mid-Autumn: dice rattling in a ceramic bowl, and everybody shouting at once.

Two guests from Ghana at the table

Our two visiting clients from Ghana had come to Quanzhou on business. They stayed for the evening, and by the end of it they were queuing up for the dice bowl with everyone else.

Nobody hands you a rulebook at a bobing table — you learn by watching a round and losing one. So we explained it between throws: which result wins which cake, what the 状元 hat means, why the round only ends when all sixty-three cakes are gone. They joined the banquet, sat through a Chinese-language toast, and took a turn at the bowl.

Which is roughly the correct way to introduce anyone to Mid-Autumn: not a presentation about it, but a seat at the table.

Why we do this at HLK

HLK started as a corner tape shop in 1993, became a company in 2003, and began exporting as Quanzhou Honglinkai in 2005. In 2022 we moved into a six-story, 3,500 m² facility in Quanzhou. Today five automated lines run there, producing 2M+ units a month against 1,500+ OEM orders every six months for buyers in 30+ countries.

None of that happened in one generation of staff. A good part of the team at that table has worked together for years — through the move, through new lines, through other people’s launches. Our own view is that these two facts are related. A factory that keeps its own people together is a factory that keeps your specification together: the same hands are still on the line when the reorder comes in, and the person who remembers why your last batch was cut a certain way is still reachable by phone.

So we do not treat this as an HR event on the calendar. Mid-Autumn is the one festival in China that is explicitly about reunion, and the company borrowed that meaning for the evening: management, families and clients, one table, one set of dice. It is also the most honest version of how this business actually runs — most of what we make with a client is decided at a table anyway. Better that the table has food on it.

If you are working with us, or thinking about it, the invitation is not only to the factory floor. Watch the production walkthroughs, read how our six-step quality control holds a batch together, or book a visitor slot — and if you come in late September, there may be a bowl of dice waiting.

To everyone who marked it this year: 中秋节快乐.

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HLK — Quanzhou Honglinkai New Material Co., Ltd. — OEM/ODM for nasal strips, mouth tape and body patches. In adhesive tape since 1993, exporting from Quanzhou, Fujian since 2005.

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