Food and Gambling with the Philosophy Department

Michael again. This evening at 5:00 we were just about to cook dinner when we got a phone call from Zhou, a colleague in the Philosophy Department, inviting us to the department dinner tonight at 6:00. In fact, we were honored guests and I even made a short speech over the PA system (which Zhou translated). We thought it all humorous since weren't aware of anything just an hour before.

The Philosophy department at Xiamen University has about 40 full-time faculty members (and no part-timers!), so the room was packed with current and retired professors. The occasion, of course, was the Autumn Moon Festival that Ann has mentioned in past posts. The Moon Festival is progressively taking over Xiamen and all aspects of life here.

Another funny thing was that the event was at a restaurant that is almost connected to our building but we were completely unaware of. The closed end of the restaurant faces our buildings front door. It is under construction so we just assumed the whole place was closed. Not so. We really played the dumb foreigners when we had to be walked to a place 50 yards from our apartment.

The banquet was our biggest so far, with a ridiculous number of dishes brought out. Most of them were fish dishes (the Fujian specialty) or vegetables. Quite delicious, even Thomas had his fill of food and pop. Then . . . the tables were cleared and the room lapsed into some serious gambling.
Here you can see people hunched over the tables gambling away. It's a dice roll into a bowl. You are throwing 6 dice and hoping to get as many 4's as you can. In the absence of 4's, you can also win by getting 4 dice with 2's, or 3's, etc. Prizes are handed out based on a sheet that I didn't bother trying to fathom.

Here Ann is throwing into a bowl while Helen, Sophia and Professor Chen (Contemporary Epistemology and Kant) look on. The game is peculiar to Xiamen. Everybody celebrates the Moon Festival, but only in Xiamen do people gamble. Ann asked Chen why people do this here and he said "it's been going on for so long nobody knows. Maybe it started before people were writing things down."
The other side of the table had Thomas (who amused the table by blowing on the dice before he rolled), myself, Zhou (seated; Philosophy of History), another colleague (Philosophy of Science and Technology), and the man rolling who I never met but showed up just for the gambling. I also asked Zhou how long it's been going on, and he thought probably longer than the Ching dynasty. "Very likely back to the Ming Dynasty."

The loot is, maybe, not so impressive after the desire for victory has subsided. Here Thomas and Helen show off our bags.

The final tally included 16 bars of soap, 5 packages with a kitchen towel and scouring pad, 4 double-toothbrush packages, 6 packages of tissues, and the really impressive prize (won by a particularly good throw from Ann): a very large bottle of cooking oil (made of what, I have no clue).