Every year Chinese nationals celebrate their country’s national day on October 1, which is the anniversary of the founding on that day in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China.

It is obviously incorrect to say that China celebrates its 73rd birthday this year because the Chinese nation has had a much longer continued existence, one that stretches back several thousand years.

The concept of the nation’s “birthday”, and the observance and celebration thereof, was very much a 20th century innovation. Ancient and imperial China did not have a “national day”, at least not one that is presently understood. The closest equivalent would be the nationwide celebration of an emperor’s birthday.

Before the first few centuries of the common era, the anniversary of one’s birth was not celebrated in any special way. The date and time of one’s birth were remembered and used for religious and social purposes, but birthday parties came later with the introduction of a foreign religion.

Buddhism, originally from the Indian subcontinent, was zealously embraced between the 3rd and the 6th centuries by the Chinese, who made the religion their own. One of its most important festivals was the Buddha’s Birthday, which was marked with much joy and fanfare by both the ruling elites and commoners.

Scholars aver that in those four centuries, the celebration of the Buddha’s Birthday in China influenced the Chinese to begin celebrating their own, a practice that continued into the Sui and Tang dynasties (581–907). An early Tang record states that “it is a recent custom that children whose parents are alive have a get-together with food and drink on their birthdays every year”.

It was against this backdrop that Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty, who reigned from 712 to 756, started the tradition of celebrating the sovereign’s birthday as a national holiday, one that was not tied in to religion or agricultural cycles but to the state.

In 729, on the fifth day of the eighth month in the traditional Chinese calendar, Xuanzong was celebrating his 45th birthday at a banquet with his officials, when his chief councillors submitted a petition, which just happened to be at hand, seeking his “benevolent permission” to designate this day as the “Festival of a Thousand Autumns”, to be observed annually by the whole country with much rejoicing.

The emperor gave his permission with alacrity, for how could he deprive his loyal subjects of this joyous commemoration of the anniversary of his august birth?

After Xuanzong, the birthdays of all emperors of the Tang and subsequent dynasties were designated as a statutory national holiday by law, though they were known by a variety of names according to the preferences of individual rulers.

There was the Festival of Earthly Peace, the Festival to Celebrate Achievements, the Festival of the Flourishing Birthday, the Festival of Eternal Spring, the Festival of Heavenly Tranquillity, to name a few. It was also known as the Festival of the Holy Birth, whose Chinese name, shengdan jie, is used today to denote Christmas.

After the last imperial dynasty fell and the monarchy abolished in 1912, the newly established Republic of China chose October 10, the date of the Wuchang Uprising in 1911 that led to the demise of the Qing dynasty, as its national day. The “Double Tenth Day” is still observed in Taiwan.

When the People’s Republic replaced the Republic in 1949, October 1 replaced the October 10 as China’s national day.

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