Hong Kong hills shine with protest lights in Mid-Autumn Festival rally

Thousands of Hong Kong activists used torches, lanterns and laser pens to mild up two of the city's best-known hillsides on Friday night time (Sep 13) in an beautiful protest alongside an annual festival.

Friday evening marks the begin of the Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the most vital dates in the Chinese calendar, and is traditionally a time for thanksgiving, spending time with household and praying for true fortune.

But as Hong Kong convulses from more than three months of political unrest, activists used the night as a way to maintain their motion buoyant with no signs and symptoms of protests abating. Throughout the evening lots of activists with torches on their heads hiked their way up hill trails leading to the top of Lion Rock which overlooks the sprawling skyscrapers of the city's Kowloon district, one of the most densely populated locations on earth.

They also gathered to shape a lengthy human chain on the Peak - a famous tourist spot which provides picture-postcard views of the finance hub and its dramatic waterfront. Both groups, whose lights had been seen to every other across the harbour, chanted slogans and sang Glory to Hong Kong, an anonymously penned protest anthem which has gone viral in current days. "Today's autumn festival is a symbol of family and togetherness, so this is in the spirit of gathering the strength of the Hong Kong people," a 24-year-old protester, who gave his surname Yip, informed AFP as he sweated his way toward the pinnacle of Lion Rock in the unforgiving sticky evening heat

City leader Carrie Lam made the shock cross closing week to wholly scrap the loathed extradition law - however the gesture was dismissed by using protesters as too little, too late. On Friday evening, in one of the protest movement's extra surreal moments, small groups of demonstrators gathered on a housing property where Lam was visiting, shouting "We want to devour mooncakes". Residents instructed nearby media Lam had made a brief visit to a nearby aged domestic to distribute mooncakes, a dense pastry surpassed out at some stage in the Mid-Autumn Festival. Activists and analysts say the movement will only quit when some of the different key demands are met such as an inquiry into the police, an amnesty for the almost 1,400 humans arrested and customary suffrage.

There is little signal of Beijing ceding to those needs or the protests abating.