In late September 2026 the HLK team sat down for Mid-Autumn Festival: management, staff and their families, one long table in Quanzhou. Two clients from Ghana happened to be in the city that week, so they were given chairs too.
What Mid-Autumn is
Mid-Autumn falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, on the night of the fullest moon. In 2026 that was 25 September. It is one of the four great traditional festivals of China, and the only one whose entire subject is reunion: the moon is round, so the family should be whole.
The festival began as a moon offering around the autumn equinox, became a nationwide night of moon-viewing under the Tang, and settled into its modern shape in the Ming and Qing. It has been a public holiday since 2008, specifically so that people working away from home can travel back for one evening.
Bobing: how southern Fujian keeps it
Quanzhou sits in the south of Fujian, and Mid-Autumn here carries an extra layer. It is called bobing, literally “gambling for cakes”. The equipment is simple: six dice, one deep red porcelain bowl, and sixty-three mooncakes arranged in six grades borrowed from the imperial examination rankings.
- 状元 (top scholar) — 1 cake
- 对堂 (second in the hall) — 2 cakes
- 三红 (three reds) — 4 cakes
- 四进 (fourth graduate) — 8 cakes
- 二举 (second degree) — 16 cakes
- 一秀 (first degree) — 32 cakes
Players throw all six dice into the bowl, moving anticlockwise around the table. One red four wins a yixiu; two win an erju; three win a sanhong. Four of a kind that are not fours wins a sijin, and one of each face in a single throw wins a duitang. Four red fours makes you zhuangyuan for the night: five of a kind is wuzi dengke, and the highest throw of all, four red fours with two red ones, is zhuangyuan cha jinhua.
The zhuangyuan cake is about twenty centimetres across, roughly the size of the moon it is named after, usually stamped with Chang’e or the jade rabbit. The winner wears the zhuangyuan hat and takes the red packet. It is a costume for one night, and that is the entire point: at this table everyone can be top scholar, and nobody has to sit an exam.
The custom is protected heritage now. Xiamen’s bobing entered Fujian’s intangible cultural heritage list in 2005 and the national list in 2008, and Quanzhou’s own Minnan bobing was added to Fujian’s seventh provincial list in 2022.
Two guests who happened to be there
Our visitors from Ghana had not come for the festival. They were in Quanzhou on business that week, and when the evening ran long they stayed. Nobody hands out a rulebook at a bobing table — you learn by watching a round and losing one — so the rules were explained between throws, and by the end of the night they were queuing for the bowl like everyone else.
Why a tape factory cares who is still at the table
Most of what we build with a customer is decided in conversation: which adhesive, which substrate, which tolerance, and what to do when a batch does not behave. Those decisions live in people, not only in a document. Continuity of staff is therefore not a soft benefit; it is part of the specification.
A good part of the team at that table has worked together for years, through a plant move and several new lines. The person who remembers why your last batch was cut a particular way is still reachable by phone. That is what a stable table buys you.
Since 1993, in Quanzhou
HLK began as a tape workshop in 1993. The company was formally incorporated as Quanzhou Honglinkai New Material Co., Ltd. in 2005, and has exported from Quanzhou, Fujian since then. In 2022 we moved into our current plant: a total site area of 5,000 m², with 1,000 m² of floor space per level and 3,500 m² of production space.
Coating and converting run on automated lines against scheduled OEM and ODM orders. Quality management is certified to ISO 13485 and ISO 9001, and we supply buyers in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
One table, one set of dice
We do not treat Mid-Autumn as an HR item on the calendar. It is the one festival in China that is explicitly about reunion, and for one evening the company borrows that meaning: management, families, and whoever happens to be visiting, at the same table.
If you work with us, the invitation is not only to the factory floor. Ask for a production walkthrough, request samples, or book a visit — and if you come in late September, there may be a bowl of dice waiting.
Happy Mid-Autumn to everyone who marked it this year.
HLK — Quanzhou Honglinkai New Material Co., Ltd. OEM/ODM for nasal strips, mouth tape and sports tape. In adhesive tape since 1993, exporting from Quanzhou, Fujian since 2005.
