Beijing residents consumed 15,000 tons of mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, which fell on Sunday.

The sales value of mooncakes, a traditional food to mark the festival, was estimated at 900 million yuan (US$111 million) to 1 billion yuan (US$123 million), making up one tenth of the national sales value, Monday's Beijing Morning Post reports.

Mooncake is a kind of cookie with fillings made up of sugar, fat, sesame, walnut, lotus seeds, dried flower petals or other ingredients. Chinese people traditionally eat mooncakes on the occasion of family reunion on the Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Moon Festival.

According to a sample survey on 1,000 residents in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai, 90 percent of them said they bought mooncakes for their own consumption or sent them to relatives and colleagues as gifts during the occasion.

China has now more than 10,000 mooncake producers, which turned out 200,000 tons of mooncakes nationwide last year, said Zhu Nianlin, council director of the Chinese Association of Bakery and Confectionery Industry.

(Xinhua News Agency September 20, 2005)