As the National Day and the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday are just around the corner, mooncakes, symbols of family reunion and harmony in China, are flying off shelves with both time-honored recipes and new flavors gaining popularity.
In Beijing's time-honored Daoxiangcun bakery, mooncakes occupy the front and center of store displays. This year, the shop has launched six freshly baked varieties with unique flavors, an instant hit among shoppers.
"They're quite different from the traditional ones, more creative and better suited to younger people's tastes," said Xing Rui, local resident.
According to Li Xiaoxuan, Daoxiangcun's Mid-Autumn Festival project manager, mooncake sales have surged in the past week and are continuing to rise as the holiday approaches.
"Each store is now selling about 200 freshly baked mooncakes a day, which is double compared to last week," she said.
Up north in Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, the century-old bakery Laodingfeng has seen crowds lining up at opening time these days. Customers swarm both the checkout counters and gift box display areas.
"Since the door opened, I've had 200 to 300 people visiting the store, with most of them asking about the gift boxes," said Chen Jin, a staff member at Laodingfeng's flagship store.
In Shanghai, many heritage brands are embracing creativity. Some have introduced unconventional flavors like roasted coconut and glazed ham, while one shop is selling mini mooncakes shaped like coal balls, drawing curious crowds eager to snap photos and try something new.
Platform data shows that the Mid-Autumn mooncake market is shifting toward health-conscious and lighter gift options, with 73 percent of consumers prioritizing clean ingredients and favoring low-sugar or additive-free products, while 59 percent prefer lighter gift options.
The eight-day National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holiday begins this Wednesday.
Both traditional, new-flavor mooncakes popular among Chinese as Mid-Autumn Festival approaches
Honor's humanoid robot, Lightning, which swept the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on Sunday, is a natural extension of years of accumulation in consumer electronics technology, said its developers.
A leading smart device provider in China, Honor independently developed the model, which dominated the podium at the event as it was used by all three teams whose autonomous navigating robots ran the fastest times.
At the Honor factory in Pingshan District in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province, where robotics engineers developed Lightning. They said the robot's body design incorporates a simulation system that, through artificial intelligence algorithms, can iterate nearly 30,000 design schemes of varying sizes over three months. Complete and mature systems are also in place for battery, communication, and reliability verification.
"We built a simulation lab from scratch. For the robots, we digitize the entire design and put it into a computer. We have our own material library, which can meet the force, thermal, and chemical property demands for each component, under different environments and speeds. We've accumulated about 1000 kinds of materials. For example, if there's a risk with the robot's neck, we just need to change the material code from 001 to 002. Now, through our simulations, we only need one day to perform parallel calculations on 10 different designs, before creating a mold and verifying it in the lab," said Li Zheng, a senior engineer at Honor.
An autonomous robot capable of completing a half-marathon involves a complete industry chain, with core components including high-precision sensors, LiDAR, motors, operating systems, and control algorithms. The development of robotic marathoners have driven an increasing number of component enterprises to get involved.
Manifold, a tech firm established by newly-graduated PhDs, has developed a 3D spatial memory module, which can model an environment in real time and transform it into images that robots can understand. They said several robots running the half-marathon this year adopted their solution.
"Our device can operate within a one-kilometer tunnel with an error margin of only tens of centimeters. For robots, especially in the absence of GPS, this allows them to accurately determine their location. The underlying technology is a multi-sensor fusion technology that we developed in-house," said Qin Youming, CEO and founder of Manifold.
The Beijing Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center set up a training camp for the marathon event. Many university students came a month ahead of the event to develop and debug their technologies and algorithms based on open-source robot bodies, databases, and training platforms.
"These high-quality databases and highly open-source control algorithms are actually very helpful to us. We no longer need to build the house from the ground up, but can skip the most basic part," said Sun Jingyu, a student from Shandong University.
"Through this racing event, I believe we can make our robots more reliable and stable, while also supporting high-dynamic, high-load movements. This is crucial for robots' future application in both industrial, commercial and domestic scenarios," said Guo Yijie, head of the innovative humanoid department and the Marathon project of Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
Engineers share development story behind Beijing humanoid half-marathon champion model
