The chrysanthemums on the hillside above Kaifeng were already frost-bitten at the edges, their petals curled like the fingers of an old woman warming herself at a stove. It was the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, and the air carried that specific autumn sharpness — cold enough to make your nostrils sting, warm enough that the sun on your back felt like a borrowed coat. Vendors along the path to the Longting Pavilion were selling cups of júhuā jiǔ, 菊花酒 — chrysanthemum wine — and the smell of fermented rice mingled with something bitter and floral, like crushed aspirin dissolved in honey. I bought a cup. It tasted of autumn itself: sweet at first, then a slow, medicinal burn at the back of the throat.
This is the Double Ninth Festival, Chóngyáng Jié, 重阳节 — the ninth day of the ninth month in the lunar calendar, when the yang energy is said to reach its double peak before surrendering to winter. For over two thousand years, Chinese families have marked this day not just with poetry and family reunions but with a remarkably practical set of health rituals: climbing mountains, drinking chrysanthemum wine, wearing dogwood sprigs, and eating foods designed to protect the body as the season turns.
What strikes me most, after more than a decade of watching these customs unfold, is how thoroughly they blur the line between medicine and metaphor. Every practice has a "why" — and that why is usually rooted in a sophisticated, if ancient, understanding of how the body responds to cold, dry air and shrinking daylight.
Why Climb a Mountain When You Could Just Stay Warm?
The climbing tradition, dēnggāo, 登高, is the festival's most physically demanding custom. On Double Ninth, families across China — particularly in provinces like Shandong, Henan, and Guangdong — haul themselves up hillsides at dawn. I once joined a group of retirees climbing Mount Tai in the pre-dawn dark, their flashlights bobbing like fireflies. By the time we reached the Mid-Heaven Gate, the sky had turned the color of weak tea, and an old man beside me was eating a steamed bun with pickled radish, completely unbothered by the altitude.
The health logic here is layered. In traditional Chinese medicine, autumn is the season of the lungs, and dry air is believed to injure the fèi, 肺. Climbing — deep breathing, physical exertion, exposure to cooler, cleaner air above the valley haze — was understood as a way to strengthen lung qi before winter. The ninth month is also when hánlù, 寒露, "Cold Dew," gives way to shuāngjiàng, 霜降, "Frost's Descent" — two of the 24 Solar Terms that mark the year's steepest temperature drop. Moving the body upward, quite literally, was a way to move the blood and keep the cold from settling in the joints.
"独在异乡为异客，每逢佳节倍思亲。遥知兄弟登高处，遍插茱萸少一人。"
"Alone, a stranger in a strange land, I miss my kin most on festival days. I know my brothers climb the heights, dogwood pinned to their sleeves — and one of us is missing."
— Wang Wei (王维), Tang dynasty, "Thinking of My Brothers on Double Ninth Day"
Wang Wei's poem is the most famous evocation of the festival, and it captures something essential: the climb was never solitary. It was a communal act of preventive care, a shared ritual of moving together before the season of stillness arrived.
The Dogwood Sprig: An Ancient Air Purifier?
Wang Wei mentions dogwood — zhūyú, 茱萸 — and for good reason. On Double Ninth, people once pinned small red pouches of dogwood berries to their sleeves or hung them by the door. The berries, from the Cornus officinalis tree, are bright, glossy, and smell faintly of camphor and citrus peel. Crush one between your fingers and you get a sharp, resinous scent that lingers.
In traditional pharmacology, dogwood fruit was used to "dispel wind-damp" and "warm the middle burner" — terms that map roughly onto treating colds, joint aches, and digestive sluggishness. Modern analysis has found the berries contain compounds with antimicrobial properties, which may explain why they were considered protective during the season when respiratory illnesses begin to circulate. Whether the ancient rationale was pharmacological or symbolic, the practice made sensory sense: a pungent, bright-smelling object pinned to your chest in the crisp autumn air felt like a small fortress against the coming dark.
Today, the dogwood custom has faded in most cities, though you still see it in rural parts of Shaanxi and Henan. I once watched an elderly woman in a village near Xi'an sew tiny dogwood sachets for her grandchildren, her needle moving with the same rhythm as her storytelling about "the old days when everyone wore them." The sachets smelled like a spice cabinet and a forest floor had been introduced to each other.
Why Do People Drink Chrysanthemum Wine on Double Ninth?
Here is the question I get asked most often by friends outside China: why wine? And why chrysanthemums?
Chrysanthemum, júhuā, 菊花, blooms precisely when other flowers die — in the cold, dry weeks of the ninth and tenth lunar months. In Chinese herbal tradition, it is classified as "cooling" and "clearing," used to soothe the liver, brighten the eyes, and relieve headaches associated with "liver fire" — a pattern that includes irritability, red eyes, and dizziness, all of which sound suspiciously like the effects of too much rich food and alcohol, which is exactly what the festival season brings.
The wine itself is not grape wine. It is usually a rice wine or báijiǔ, 白酒, infused for weeks with dried chrysanthemum petals, sometimes with goji berries and a touch of rock sugar. The result is pale gold, slightly bitter, and fragrant in a way that reminds me of chamomile tea that has been to a party and stayed too late. In Shaoxing, where the rice wine tradition runs deep, families begin steeping their chrysanthemum wine around the Mid-Autumn Festival so it is ready by Double Ninth.
The health rationale was straightforward: alcohol was believed to move blood and warm the meridians, while chrysanthemum cooled and cleared. Together, they balanced the body against the season's dryness and cold. Whether or not one accepts the pharmacology, the ritual itself — a small cup, shared among family, after a morning climb — creates a moment of deliberate pause, a sensory marker that the year is turning.
If you are curious about the seasonal foods and drinks associated with other points in the traditional Chinese festival calendar, the autumn months are particularly rich in these botanical interventions.
The Double Ninth Cake: Layered Like the Year Itself
No account of Double Ninth health practices is complete without the food. Chóngyáng gāo, 重阳糕, is a steamed cake made from rice flour, layered with red bean paste, dates, and sometimes chestnuts or walnuts — all ingredients that traditional medicine associates with strengthening the spleen and kidneys, the organs believed to need support as winter approaches.
The cake is also a pun: gāo, 糕 (cake), sounds like gāo, 高 (high), so eating it reinforces the climbing tradition. The layers themselves are symbolic — some recipes call for nine layers, echoing the double ninth. In Suzhou, the cakes are delicate, barely sweet, and topped with osmanthus flowers that perfume the entire steamer basket. In northern China, they are denser, studded with dried fruit, and eaten with a cup of hot tea. I once watched a Suzhou baker fold osmanthus into rice flour for an hour, the kitchen smelling of honey and stone fruit, her hands moving with the practiced economy of someone who has made this cake every autumn for forty years.
"九月九，饮菊酒，人共菊花醉重阳。"
"On the ninth of the ninth, drink chrysanthemum wine; together with the chrysanthemums, we grow drunk on Double Ninth."
— Folk saying from Jiangnan region
The nutritional logic is sound: rice flour is easily digestible, red beans are considered a "kidney tonic," and dates are warming. The cake is a gentle, sweet vehicle for the transition from the abundant eating of harvest season to the austerity of winter.
What the Almanac Tells Us About Autumn Health
I often check the Chinese Almanac in the days around Double Ninth, not because I believe in , but because the almanac's structure encodes centuries of agricultural and medical observation. The huánglì, 黄历, tracks the 24 Solar Terms and marks days as suitable or unsuitable for activities like travel, bathing, or even haircuts — all of which were once tied to health beliefs.
Take the current almanac entry for late October: it advises against cutting hair, warning that "sores will appear." This is not arbitrary. In autumn, the dry air and dropping temperatures make the skin more vulnerable to irritation, and traditional medicine held that the head should be protected from cold. Similarly, the caution against "digging wells" in autumn reflects the belief that disturbing the earth before winter could harm its stored energy — a farming and health observation wrapped in symbolic language.
The almanac also tracks nà yīn, 纳音, and the five elements, which inform practices like choosing the right outfit colors for the season. In autumn, white and metallic colors are associated with the lungs; wearing them was thought to support respiratory health. These are not prescriptions I would offer anyone, but they are windows into a coherent system of preventive care that predates modern medicine by millennia.
The Mountain After the Crowd Has Gone
By late afternoon on Double Ninth, the paths down the mountain are quiet. The vendors pack up their chrysanthemum wine, the dogwood sachets disappear into pockets, and the hillside returns to its own rhythm — wind in the dried grass, the smell of frost beginning to form. I remember sitting on a stone step near the bottom of Mount Tai one year, finishing the last of my wine, watching an old couple descend slowly, their arms linked. They were not talking. They did not need to. The climb was the conversation.
The health practices of Double Ninth are not a cure for anything. But they are a way of paying attention — to the season, to the body, to the people walking beside you. In a world that increasingly treats health as a set of numbers and a list of supplements, there is something quietly radical about climbing a hill because the yang energy is high, drinking a bitter wine because the chrysanthemums are in bloom, and eating a cake that tastes of honey and memory. The ancients were not wrong about everything. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your lungs is to fill them with cold mountain air, and the best thing you can do for your spirit is to share that air with someone.
As the last light left the pavilion roof, I noticed the woman beside me — a stranger — was holding a sprig of dogwood. She caught my eye and smiled. "For the cold," she said, in a dialect I could barely follow. "My grandmother always said." I nodded. The air was sharp. The wine was gone. The mountain, as always, had the last word.
This article is based on traditional Chinese calendrical systems and historical texts, provided for cultural learning and reference purposes only.