Initial ideas

-Festival Chosen

The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival or Moon cake Festival, is a traditional festival celebrated in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Vietnam, as well as by overseas Chinese and Vietnamese communities. Similar holidays are celebrated in Japan, Korea, and throughout Southeast Asia.

-Elements

FULL MOON

LANTERN

CHANG E

Chang’e (Chinese: 嫦娥; pinyin: Cháng’é, unofficially rendered as Chang-Er or Chang-o for simpler pronunciation), originally known as Heng’e, is the Chinese goddess of the Moon. She is the subject of several legends in Chinese mythology, most of which incorporate several of the following elements: Houyi the archer, a benevolent or malevolent emperor, an elixir of life, and the Moon. She was married to Houyi. In modern times, Chang’e has been the namesake of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program.

HAN dressings

Hanfu (simplified Chinese: 汉服) is the traditional styles of clothing worn by the Han Chinese. There are several representative styles of hanfu, such as the ruqun (an upper-body garment with a long outer skirt), the aoqun (an upper-body garment with a long underskirt), the beizi (usually a slender knee-length jacket) and the shenyi (a long, belted robe with wide sleeves), and the shanku (jackets and trousers).

Hanfu structures & original designs & patterns

Building blocks

My idea is based on the recreation of the traditional Chinese Festival character — Chang E and to make it more suitable for modern style and understandings.

As the background of Chang E’s story is ancient China in XIHAN dynasty which is 4000 years away from nowadays, and with the development of technology and culture communications more and more foreigners started to be interested in this Moon festival, meanwhile it becomes meaningful to make a character full of history studies more visible.

There are many tales about Chang’e, including a well-known story about her that is given as the origin of the Mid-Autumn Festival.In one version, in a very distant past, Chang’e was a beautiful woman. Ten suns had risen together into the skies and scorched the Earth, thus causing hardship for the people. Houyi the archer shot down nine of them, leaving just one Sun, and was given either two or one with enough for two elixirs of immortality as a reward. He did not consume it straight away, but let Chang’e keep it with her, as he did not want to gain immortality without his beloved wife. However, while Houyi went out hunting, his apprentice Fengmeng broke into his house and tried to force Chang’e to give the elixir to him. She took them instead of giving them to Fengmeng. Then, Chang’e flew upward past the heavens, choosing the Moon as a residence, as she loved her husband and hoped to live nearby him.Houyi discovered what had transpired and felt guilty, so he displayed the fruits and cakes that Chang’e had enjoyed, and killed himself.In older versions of the story, Chang’e stole the elixir from Houyi, drank it, and flew to the Moon so that her husband could not go after her.Chang’e appears in Wu Cheng’en‘s late 16th-century novel Journey to the West.

But for now on, the character and her background story has been used on famous games as a reminder of histories.