Zhong Qiu Jie 中秋节 Mooncake Festival 2025

Mid-Autumn Festival 2023

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a popular observance in Singapore amongst those of ethnic Chinese heritage. It is not a public holiday, but malls nevertheless decorate and sell special food items at this time of year. Here and in other countries, this day is also known as Mid-Autumn Festival.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is held on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, on a full moon day. This is always in mid-fall, sometime in later September or early October. Moon cakes are the food of choice on this holiday. These cakes are filled with sweet-tasting bean paste or with lotus seeds or another filling. Originally, the Festival was closely connected with making offerings to the moon god to get a bountiful harvest. Today, most are not moon worshipers, but the cake is still shaped as a moon for that reason.

In Singapore, many families go out to see the various Chinese lantern and other lights displays at night during the festival. Kids love Mid-Autumn Festival because they not only get to eat tasty moon cakes, but also they get to hold the strings of floating, fully lit lanterns as they walk about town with their parents. Traditionally, lanterns were lit with wax candles and constructed of colourful Chinese paper. But today you will also see make-shift lanterns made of cellophane bags and hangar wires and store-bought versions lit by battery power and shaped like popular cartoon characters.

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Mooncake is a symbol of family reunion for its round shape.

Pomelo is not only round in shape, its Chinese name, you zi, is also a homophone for words that mean "bless the son."

The tradition of eating taro on Mid-Autumn Festival dates back to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) but the meaning of eating taro differs from different Chinese regions. One of them believes that eating taro during Mid-Autumn Festival can ward off the evil spirits.

Water Caltrop - A Kind of Nut Boiled and Eaten with Mooncakes

Remembering Steve Jobs 2025

Steve Jobs

Jobs introducing the iPhone 4 in 2010

Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, business magnate, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and German-American mother. He was adopted shortly after his birth. Jobs attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.

In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took a few Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film Toy Story (1995) and went on to become a major animation studio, producing over 25 films since.

In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with English designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign and leading to the Apple Store, App Store (iOS), iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store. In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS), based on NeXT's NeXTSTEP platform, giving the operating system a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56. In 2022, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Steve Jobs Archive shares a special photo memory of the late Apple co-founder with the Mac in 1984

Steve Jobs would have turned 68 years old today. The recently announced Steve Jobs Archive has shared a special snapshot in time of the late Apple co-founder and the Macintosh to mark the date. In the photo, Steve Jobs is seen closely examining a person using the newly introduced Macintosh in a store window in New Orleans in 1984.

The photo was shot 39 years ago in February 1984. The original Macintosh was introduced only a month earlier. Leslie Berlin, who is the founding Executive Director of the Steve Jobs Archive, shares the story behind the image of Jobs spotting the Mac in the wild nearly 40 years ago.

“Steve’s friend Jean Pigozzi, who calls himself a “serious amateur photographer,” took the image and told me the story behind it,” Berlin writes. “Although Jean did not work in tech, Steve invited him along to a software conference in New Orleans. One evening after the event, as they were walking down O’Keefe Avenue looking for dinner, Steve—a notoriously fast walker—pulled to a halt. Someone in a store window was working on a Macintosh.”

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21 facts you didn't know about China

• The Great Wall of China is not a single, unbroken wall but a series of walls and fortifications. It is the longest wall in the world, with an estimated length of 13,170 miles (21,196 kilometers).
• China is home to the oldest continuous civilization in the world, with written records dating back over 3,500 years.
• China is the world's most populous country, with over 1.4 billion people, representing approximately 18% of the global population.
• The country uses a "social credit" system, which rates citizens based on their behavior and rewards or penalizes them accordingly.
• China is one of the largest countries by land area, covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometers, making it the fourth largest country in the world.
• The Chinese invented paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing, among other things. These inventions are often referred to as the Four Great Inventions of ancient China.
• The Giant Panda, one of the world's most endangered and adored animals, is native to China and serves as an unofficial national symbol.
• China is the world's largest producer and consumer of rice, and it plays a central role in the country's cuisine and culture.
• The Yangtze River in China is the third-longest river in the world, stretching over 6,300 kilometers (3,917 miles).
• The Terracotta Army, discovered in 1974 in Xi'an, consists of thousands of life-sized clay soldiers that were buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, to protect him in the afterlife.
• Feng Shui, an ancient Chinese practice of arranging physical environments to harmonize with spiritual energies, originated in China over 3,000 years ago.
• The Silk Road was an ancient network of trade routes that connected China to the Mediterranean Sea, facilitating not only trade but also the exchange of ideas and cultures.
• China has a "megacity" called the Pearl River Delta, which is the world's largest urban area in both size and population, surpassing Tokyo.
• Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is the most significant traditional Chinese holiday, celebrated with fireworks, dragon dances, and family reunions.
• The Forbidden City in Beijing is the world's largest palace complex, consisting of 980 buildings over 180 acres.
• China's high-speed rail network is the most extensive in the world, with over 37,000 kilometers (about 23,000 miles) of tracks.
• Traditional Chinese medicine, with its roots going back over 2,500 years, emphasizes balancing the body's internal energy and harmony with the natural world.
• China was the first country to use paper money, during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD).
• The concept of Yin and Yang, which represents the idea that opposite forces are interconnected and interdependent, originates from ancient Chinese philosophy.
• The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Sichuan Province is a renowned facility dedicated to the conservation of giant pandas.
• China is one of the world's oldest tea-producing countries, with a history of tea cultivation that dates back over 3,000 years.

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National Day of the People's Republic of China

Flower garden at Beihai Park. The signboards read  国庆  (guóqìng; literally "national celebration"), i.e. "National Day"

National Day (Chinese: 国庆节; pinyin: guóqìng jié; lit. 'national celebration day'), officially the National Day of the People's Republic of China 中华人民共和国国庆节, is a public holiday in China celebrated annually on 1 October as the national day of the People's Republic of China, commemorating Mao Zedong's formal proclamation of the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The Chinese Communist Party victory in the Chinese Civil War resulted in the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Revolution whereby the People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China.

Although it is observed on 1 October, another six days are added to the official holiday, normally in lieu of the two weekend breaks around 1 October, making it a de facto public holiday comprising seven consecutive days also known as Golden Week 黄金周 huángjīn zhōu with specifics regulated by the State Council. Festivities and concerts are usually held nationwide on this day, with a grand military parade and mass pageant event held on select years. The parade held on 1 October 2019 marked the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated the incumbent Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist government of the Republic of China in the Chinese Civil War that took place from 1927 to 1950 except for a brief alliance against Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War. In its aftermath, the nationalist government withdrew to the island of Taiwan, previously a prefecture of the Qing Empire that was ceded to Japan under its colonial rule from 1895 to 1945. The People's Republic of China was founded on 1 October 1949, with a ceremony celebrating the forming of the Central People's Government taking place in Tiananmen Square in its new national capital of Peking (previously Peiping) on the same day that year. The first public parade of the new People's Liberation Army took place there, following the address by the country's first Chairman Mao Zedong officially declaring the formal establishment of the Republic. The Central People's Government passed the Resolution on the National Day of the People's Republic of China on 3 December 1949 and declared that 1 October is the National Day.

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Autumn Equinox 2025 秋分 Qiūfēn

The September Equinox

There are two equinoxes every year – in September and March – when the sun shines directly on the equator and the length of day and night is nearly equal. Seasons are opposite on either side of the Equator, so the equinox in September is also known as the autumnal (fall) equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and is considered the first day of fall.

In the Southern Hemisphere, it is known as the vernal (spring) equinox and marks the first day of spring. The September equinox occurs the moment the Sun crosses the celestial equator – the imaginary line in the sky above Earth’s Equator – from north to south. This happens either on September 22, 23, or 24 every year.

Earth's axis is tilted at an angle of about 23.4° in relation to the ecliptic, the imaginary plane created by Earth's path around the Sun. On any other day of the year, either the southern hemisphere or the Northern Hemisphere tilts a little towards the Sun. But on the two equinoxes, the tilt of Earth's axis is perpendicular to the Sun's rays, like the illustrations show.

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What is an Equinox?

An equinox is one of the two times of the year when the amount of daylight and nighttime hours are just about of equal length. The two equinoxes occur around March 20–21 and September 22–23.

The equinoxes occur on these days, but an equinox is not the whole day—it is the moment when the sun is directly above Earth’s equator. The word equinox can also refer to the position of the sun at this moment. This can also be called the equinoctial point. The equinoxes are traditionally considered to mark the start of spring and fall. In the Northern Hemisphere, the vernal equinox (or spring equinox) occurs in March and the autumnal equinox occurs in September. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the reverse.

In contrast, a solstice is one of the two times of the year when the positioning and tilt of Earth relative to the sun results in the most amount of daylight time or the least amount of daylight time in a single day. There are two solstices during the year: one that occurs around June 20–22 (usually June 20 or 21) and one that occurs around December 20–23 (usually December 21 or 22). In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice occurs in June and the winter solstice occurs in December. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the reverse.

related: “Equinox” vs. “Solstice” - The Difference Between Them Is Like Night And Day

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In 1945 Japan surrendered Singapore 2025

On this date in 1945, Japan surrendered to the British at former City Hall

The Royal Marines band played God Save The King at the Padang

Eighty years ago today (Sept 12), the Japanese officially surrendered to the British, bringing an end to their occupation of Southeast Asia.

This historic moment took place at the Municipal Building, later renamed City Hall, now part of the National Gallery. Two weeks earlier, on Sept 2, 1945, the formal surrender of Japan to General Douglas MacArthur took place aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Ten days later, it was Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, who accepted the Japanese surrender in Singapore at 11.10am.

The ceremony was attended by high-ranking Allied officers, commanders, and four guards-of-honour, representing the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the Indian Army, and the Australian paratroopers. There was even a fleet band playing, while a 17-gun salute by the Royal Artillery echoed through the city. Mountbatten inspected the troops before heading into the chamber for the formal surrender.

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