Chinese, US embassies share joys of festival

The moon has turned out to be a muse, making the US and Chinese embassies do the same thing when it's full this month: observing Mid-Autumn Festival.

The festival, observed according to the lunar calendar, falls on Sept 10 this year.

"To honor this traditional festival, members of the US diplomatic community in Beijing made this video of the classic Mid-Autumn Festival poem written by the famous poet Su Shi in 1076," US Ambassador Nicholas Burns said on Twitter Friday.

In the video, Burns leads the recital of "the best poem on the mid-autumn by any poet" by beginning the first two lines in Chinese, with English subtitles: When does a crisp full moon appear? Wine in hand, I ask heaven.

Seven of his colleagues at the embassy finished reading the poem in Mandarin, some of them seemed to be at the very early stage of learning the language, but they managed to get Su's message through perfectly clear:

"Dim and shine, wax and wane as moon,

Nothing ever to heart's content.

May we live a long life,

Share the same moon though thousand miles apart."

After this poem was written, critics believed all the other poems on the harvest moon could be forgotten, Chinese writer and inventor Lin Yutang (1895-1976) wrote in "The Gay Genius", a biography of Su Shi.

After the poem was read and posted online, it was viewed more than 100,000 times on the embassy's WeChat account, and 127,000 times on Twitter as of Saturday evening.