Dark side of the mooncake

The mooncakes that many Hong Kong people munched on yesterday to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival are no luxury food. They are made of cheap ingredients such as red bean and lotus seed paste that hardly make a dent in a mooncake maker's profit.

But on the mainland, the festive delicacy can take luxury dimensions. In Tianjin, for example, a mooncake with a diameter of 64cm - about four times bigger than a human face - sold at a supermarket a few weeks ago for 5,888 yuan (HK$7,200). This was about 27 times more expensive than a box of Wing Wah lotus-seed mooncakes sold in Hong Kong.

In Nanjing, a premium box of four mooncakes costs 688 yuan. The "luxury autumn gift set" (price tag: 1,998 yuan) includes hairy crabs. China Merchants Bank in September sold 6,000 gold mooncakes at 16,000 yuan apiece. It quickly sold out of the item.

Do these pricey pasties taste better? "Not really," says Ouyang Kun, head of the Beijing office of the research group World Luxury Association.

"They are over-packaged, sometimes with 18-karat gold paper, and sometimes containing some luxury freebies. That's why they get marked up," he says.

As with a considerable number of over-the-top luxury products in the mainland, pricey mooncakes are often bought as gifts for business partners or government officials by "people who want to get something done", says Ouyang.