The Cui family's Mid-Autumn Festival started with a plain family dinner and ended with an assignment and a study plan for the future, but other families couldn't celebrate it that way. The wealthy officials would invite relatives and friends, set up a stage for opera performances, and hold a big banquet not only on August 15th, but also on the days before and after.
The five troupes that had performed the Three Kingdoms opera for Ju'anzhai were the most popular. The entertainers dressed as beauties from the Three Kingdoms were even more popular during the evening vote solicitation. Countless people vied to invite them to perform. The five performers were all priced at more than 100 taels of silver a day, and the host would light incense and candles and prepare four beauties screens before they would perform.
---The incense couldn't be the cheap Sihe incense made by the Cui family, but had to be the best incense blocks like agarwood. A banquet could cost dozens of taels of silver just on burning incense.
Even though it is so expensive, there are many people in Beijing who are willing to spend a fortune to buy this limelight. Those who cannot be invited have to sacrifice their face and go to other people's homes to celebrate the festival and perform.
Only the Gao family could hold out, and invited the Qiuxi Troupe, which had just arrived from Zhending, to hold banquets and perform operas at noon for six consecutive days. Not only did they not use the famous troupe, but the opera they sang was not the popular Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but Journey to the West.
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