Tacoma’s Moon Festival will fill Chinese Reconciliation Park with food, art, performances and families Saturday—but the location is every bit as meaningful as the celebration itself.
The 14th annual Tacoma Moon Festival runs from 1 to 6 p.m. September 12 at the waterfront park, 1741 North Schuster Parkway. Admission is free, and the family-friendly gathering will feature arts and crafts, community organizations, food and performances representing Tacoma’s heritage and immigrant communities.
The celebration will conclude with a lantern parade led by the Moon Princess, one of the festival’s signature traditions.
Moon festivals—also known as Mid-Autumn festivals—have been celebrated in Chinese culture for centuries. Traditionally, families and friends gather beneath the moon, share mooncakes and celebrate their connection to one another. The moon becomes a symbol of unity: people separated by distance can still look upward and see the same thing.
That idea carries particular weight at Chinese Reconciliation Park.
On November 3, 1885, a large group of Tacoma men rounded up approximately 200 Chinese residents—including workers, merchants and families—and forcibly marched them out of the city. The following day, people looted and burned Chinese homes and businesses along the waterfront.
The organized expulsion became known as the “Tacoma Method.” Its leaders portrayed it as an orderly alternative to the deadly anti-Chinese violence occurring elsewhere, but it destroyed an established community and erased much of its visible presence from Tacoma.
More than a century later, residents began pushing the city to acknowledge what happened. In 1993, the Tacoma City Council formally recognized the expulsion and supported the creation of a commemorative park near the former Chinese settlement known as Little Canton.
The resulting Chinese Reconciliation Park was designed as both a memorial and a place where Tacoma could move toward a more inclusive future. Its Chinese-inspired garden, interpretive displays and Fuzhou Ting pavilion now occupy waterfront land near where Chinese laborers once lived and worked.
Holding a multicultural festival there is therefore no accident.
The Moon Festival brings people from Tacoma’s many immigrant and cultural communities onto ground dedicated to remembering what can happen when a city chooses exclusion. Food, music and children carrying lanterns cannot undo the events of 1885, but they can help give the location a different future.
Families can begin the day at Tacoma Art Museum, where a free Studio + Storytime program will run from 11 a.m. to noon. Children will hear Grace Lin’s A Big Mooncake for Little Star and create a starry tic-tac-toe game before heading to the waterfront festival.
The Moon Festival begins at 1 p.m. and continues until 6 p.m. Saturday, September 12. It is free and open to everyone.
At a park created to confront one of Tacoma’s most painful chapters, gathering beneath one moon feels like exactly the point.
For more information the official website for the Tacoma Moon Festival can be found here.
Learn more about Tacoma’s Chinese Reconciliation Park here.
Discover more of Tacoma in today’s Tacoma Local Minute. Catch the rest of today’s local news, events, and updates in the full issue here.