Overview: Many places around the world have a special day or event for remembering the dead. For many people in Hong Kong, Yu Lan (or the Hungry Ghost) Festival celebrates this very purpose, honoring the dead. This festival occurs every year during the 7th month of the Lunar Calendar, which is around the end of August to early September.
Honoring the Dead
There are two festivals for the dead in Hong Kong: the Qingming “Clear Brightness” Festival and the Yu Lan “Hungry Ghosts” Festival. The first festival honors deceased loved ones and old ancestors, while the second festival assists and appeases the ghosts, often strangers left uncared-for by the living world.
The Yu Lan festival is a traditional Buddhist and Taoist celebration to distract restless spirits from creating trouble. People make an effort to appease these ghosts or spirits with paper money, food, and entertainment. It has other names, including the “Feast of the Hungry Ghost,” “The Yulan Assembly (yulanhui),” “Zhong Yuan Festival,” and “Ullam-bana Festival” which comes from Sanskrit.
For Taoists, the festival celebrates the birthday of Lord Qingxu, the Official Of Earth. This deity judges the deeds of the living and releases unrest spirits from their suffering. Taoist priests pray to Lord Qingxiu during the festival’s ceremonies to pardon spirits from their sins.
For Buddhists, the festival is associated with a popular myth: a Buddhist story called Mu Lian Saving His Mother From Hell. The story goes that Mu Lian’s mother became a hungry ghost because of her sins, and he pleaded with the heavens to release her from Hell. Mu Lian made offerings to atone for her sins. As a result, people created the festival to rescue restless ghosts from their wrongdoings — a rite of salvation for ancestors and spirits in general.
Ghosts and Other Restless Spirits
When a person dies, the hun (soul) moves on to the afterlife or the world of darkness (jinjian). Many descendants and relatives honor this soul through old memories and offerings. However, there are other souls — abandoned strangers — that do not have any descendants who remember or care for them. These restless spirits are like prisoners or beggars. They are believed to be starving spirits: discontented souls who died without descendants, died young, or died without a proper funeral.
More malicious and evil spirits exist. These souls perhaps died before their time, because of murder or other tragic events. For people in the living world, the evil spirits afflict problems, misfortunes, and other adversities. The only way to avoid their mischievous doings and wrath is to offer sacrifices and entertainment. The intention of for the Yu Lan Festival is to help ghosts in their regretful or vindictive state find some peace.
People make individual offerings throughout the entire month, and neighborhoods have three days festivals for all the spirits that are released from the underworld. At these festivals, people perform rituals and sacrifices to help wandering spirits.
Hong Kong’s Chiuchow Community
The Chiuchow community celebrates the Ghost festival in neighborhoods across Hong Kong. Several days before the Hungry Ghost Festival, colorful and striking flags are placed around the neighborhood to indicate a local celebration. The flags are a guide to lead hungry ghosts to the celebration. Other guides include brightly lit red lamps on street corners and large billboards at the entrance of a Hungry Ghost festival.
The festival is held in a community space called a public playground, with a few temporary bamboo structures for performances and ceremonies. The buildings or sheds are made specifically for the three-day festival: an opera theater, an altar for the priests and an altar for donations. The ideal layout for the festival is a square with the priests’ temple altar facing East and the theater facing West.
Besides the celebrations in separate neighborhoods, a more modernized version of the tradition is held in Victoria Park to attract younger generations of Hongkongers. The traditional Yu Lan ceremonies inspired a modern sports match called the Ghost Grappling Competition. Based on the ceremony where priests throw out food from the altar, teams of six people complete to catch the most rice bags. The rice bags represent tributes to the hungry ghosts, and are blessed by the priest. Other activities are held at the location to attract younger audiences to this Chinese tradition.
Water Lanterns and Ceremonies Rituals
Water Lanterns
The evening before the Yu Lan Festival, a customary rite called “Release of the Water Lanterns (fangshuideng)” takes place in areas of Hong Kong. Adults and children send decorated paper boats and lanterns downstream. The floating paper boats are filled with little paper crews representing underworld divinities. The floating lotus-flower lanterns are lit with candles to help light a pathway for wandering ghosts. Priests conduct ceremonies on river banks to pray for the gods’ blessings. When a lotus-flower lantern’s light dies out, the task of guiding a restless spirit is complete. The spirit has found his or her way to the Naihe Bridge, a bridge in Buddhist legend that crosses into the underworld or afterlife. At other places with no river nearby, children parade through the streets holding decorated lanterns, chanting or singing rhymes to guide the visiting ghosts.
The Ceremonies
The Yu Lan festival, unlike other holidays, is celebrated outside the home. Rituals and ceremonies are conducted outside homes. Just as people in the living world do not invite people with malicious-intentions into their house, people do not invite troubled spirits in their homes. Instead, people make sacrifices and offerings to ghosts outside their home or on temporary bamboo altars in neighborhood spaces.
Many different types of rituals and ceremonies happen on the family and community levels during the festival period. On the individual level, many families leave paper gifts and food outside their homes — a private ritual to help burden ghosts. They burn Hell Banknotes for the spirits to spend. On the community level, a celebration centers around a large outdoor temple altar. Many people in the neighborhood gather together to watch Buddhist or Taoist priests chant liturgies, perform rituals, and offer incense and paper money “Hell Banknotes” for unhappy ghosts.
Ceremonies vary based on different neighborhoods’ budgets and religion, Taoist or Buddhist. The purpose of ritual ceremonies is to aid or relieve spirits from their suffering.
Many have components with the Chief priest and assisting priests ushering the ghost into the temple or altar stage. On the side of the altar stage, musicians simultaneously play the gongs or drums, erhu, and double-reeded shawan for the 2 to 3 hours of the ceremony:
The Chief Priest uses the ceremony to become “the personification of the deities,” to grant aid and release unrest ghosts from their sufferings (Stepanchuk and Wong 73). During this process, the Chief Priest invites Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (or Lord Qingxu for the Taoists) to the ceremony. He also invites the unrest spirits to the altar space, describing their sufferings in a long passage. He then becomes an image of the deity: Guanyin for the Buddhists and Lord Qingxu for the Taoists. In his new form, the Chief priest blesses the food on the altar for the crowd of hungry ghosts. The priests throw the food to the hungry ghosts, and the living crowd watching the ceremony catches the food. Some ghosts are pardoned from their suffering, while other ghosts are unfortunately not.
Throughout the next couple days, the priests chant sutras and passages from sacred texts to invite more unrests spirits to the festival and repeat the ceremony.
The video below shows a Taoist ceremony during the Hungry Ghost festival in Hong Kong.
The temple altar is a stage but instead of professional actors and actresses, the stage is occupied by Taoist priests. They perform for an audience that is visible and invisible. Therefore, a sense of order and collectivism is portrayed by the priest. In the ceremony, the Priests hold different positions and roles that contribute to their overall purpose, praying for both the loved and forgotten spirits in the room. The Chief priest is seen in the very front. He directs the actions of the assisting priests on both sides of the room. The extravagant bright yellow outfits worn by the Taoist priests demonstrate a level of formality and uniform structure in the ceremony. The outfits are more elaborated compared to their everyday outfits.The clothes add to the importance value of deity-like status and purity as the Chief priest takes on another role to pacify the spirits at the altar. The stage altar structure is an interesting component as well. The backdrop of the stage is the altar. The Taoist priests and audience face the altar, and this position leaves the audience looking at the priests’ back. This shows that the living people are only audiences to the performance: an interaction between the Taoist priests, restless spirits, and deities. Another layer of this interaction is that the conversation or interaction is not conscious. It looks rather one-sided but the ritual performance is, in fact, a three-way interaction.
Chiuchow Opera
Chinese opera performances are held throughout Hong Kong to entertain and distract ghosts from afflicting trouble to the living world. The front seats in these temporary bamboo theatre structures are empty for the main guests, the ghosts. In some neighborhoods, performances are simultaneously held with the priest altar ceremonies so that both can be heard. These professional opera performances during the Yu Lan festival praise the deities for their charitable deeds.
A particular type of regional opera called Chiuchow, Chaozhou, or Teochew Opera is popularly performed during the Hungry Ghost festival by the large Chiuchow community in urban Hong Kong. A traditional purpose for Chiuchow opera performances is celebrating the birthday of a deity, which is the purpose of the Hungry Ghosts festival. Performed in the Chiuchow dialect, the storylines are about deities for ghosts and human audiences alike. Like other varieties of Chinese opera, Chiuchow Opera uses the traditional Chinese art form that incorporates acting, singing, dancing, music, and acrobatics.
Chiuchow opera does have some notable characteristic features displayed through mime, songs and choreographed dances.
A circling scene may use the ai-tze-pu (dwarf-step), which is suggested to “imitates the shadow-puppet’s way of a hurried walk… In this dwarf-step, one foot is put on the ground, then that knee is put on the ground, then the other foot, and then the other knee, etc” (Werle 82). In addition, fresh and cheerful Chiuchow folk tunes are used in fully choreographed dances.
The video below shows a popular Chiuchow Opera performance called Maid Crossing the Lake. It displays a classic scene in Chiuchow Opera. Some noticeable features include: how the bamboo-umbrella prop indicates the young lady is traveling, the ferryman, boat movement is indicated by the actors’ mime, and dance is used to stay balanced on the boat.
There are very few English translations of Chiuchow Opera performances. This restriction limits English-speakers’ understanding of the Chiuchow opera style.
In conclusion, the Yu Lan “Hungry Ghosts” Festival highlights important Chinese traditions such as filial piety, harmony, and benevolence. These qualities are celebrated in this festival. Rituals and performances are combined in the festival’s structure. The temple altar becomes a stage for the priests, which they are compelled to perform the holy role of pardoning restless spirits. In addition to the opera performances, the festival lures people and ghosts into a space of coexistence.
Works Cited
Texts:
Clarke, Billy. “The Dos and Don’ts of the Hungry Ghost Festival.” Hong Kong, Honeycombers PTE LTD, 31 Aug. 2017.
Feature: Let’s chase hong kong’s yu lan festival. (2014, Aug 09). Xinhua News Agency – CEIS
“HKFP Lens: Backstage Moments at Hungry Ghost Festival Chiuchow Opera Shows.” HKFP, Hong Kong Free Press, 8 Nov. 2017.
“Hungry Ghost Festival.” ThaiWorldView, ThaiWorldView.com.
Keeping traditions alive at festival for the dead. (2016, Aug 13). South China Morning Post
Sharp, Mark. “Hong Kong’s Hungry Ghost Festival: All You Ever Wanted to Know.” South China Morning Post, South China Morning Post, 22 Aug. 2017.
Stepanchuk, Carol, and Charles Wong. Mooncakes and Hungry Ghosts Festivals of China. China Books & Periodicals, 1991.
Teiser, Stephen F. “Ghosts and Ancestors in Medieval Chinese Religion: The Yü-Lan-P’en Festival as Mortuary Ritual.” History of Religions, vol. 26, no. 1, 1986, pp. 47–67. JSTOR.
Ward, Barbara E. “Not Merely Players: Drama, Art and Ritual in Traditional China.” Man, vol. 14, no. 1, 1979, pp. 18–39. JSTOR.
Wei, Liming. Chinese Festivals. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Werle, Helga. “NOTES ON CHIUCHOW OPERA (潮劇).” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 15, 1975, pp. 71–87. JSTOR.
Media:
Leung, Miles. DSCF3181. Shek Pai Wan, Hong Kong, 2 Sept. 2017.
Ooi, Jonathan. “The Yu Lan Hungry Ghost Festival1.” Flickr, Happy Valley, Wan Chai, Hong Kong, 20 Aug. 2014.
OperafanSingapore, director. Teochew Festival 2014: 桃 花 过 渡 (opera excerpt 2). YouTube, YouTube, 1 Oct. 2014.
Melofield, director. Chiu Chow Opera Shown at Yulan Festival at 2008 in Tai Kong Po. YouTube, YouTube, 4 Apr. 2009.
Mike. “Chinese Floating Lotus Lanterns.” Wikimedia Commons, 22 Dec. 2006.
NTDTV, director. Islanders Feed Hungry Ghosts In Hong Kong. YouTube, YouTube, 26 Aug. 2013.
Rangama, Romuald, director. Taoist Ceremony – Hungry Ghost Festival. YouTube, YouTube, 25 Aug. 2016.
Riley, Tim. “Ghost Festival Block.” Flickr, Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong, 31 Aug. 2012.
Tyson, Neil. “French Horn Close Up.” 02 Dec 2005. Online image. Flickr. 09 Feb 2008.
