Also called Ghost Festival, Zhongyuan Festival, Yulanpen Festival, Ullambana, Pudu, Ghost Month, Chit Gwee Pua
The fifteenth night of the seventh lunar month, in August or September, when Chinese tradition holds that the gates of the underworld open and wandering spirits visit the living. Families make offerings to their own ancestors and to the hungry ghosts with no one to feed them, and observe customs meant to keep themselves safe through Ghost Month.
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Take care: This is a living religious festival, so take part as a respectful guest and follow your family's or temple's practice. Burn joss paper and incense only in proper metal burners, away from buildings, and obey local burning rules. Floating lanterns should be joined at organised events where they are collected afterwards.
Temples and communities float lotus-shaped lanterns on paper boats down rivers to guide lost souls back to the afterlife. When a lantern goes out it is said the soul has found its way. In Taiwan a lantern procession is held on the thirteenth day and the water lanterns are released on the fourteenth.
Uses: Lotus lanterns, Paper boats
Temples and neighbourhood groups fund loud, colourful night concerts on temporary stages to entertain the ghosts and the living. The red seats in the front row are left empty for the spirit guests, and sitting there is said to bring sickness.
In Vietnam the same day is Vu Lan, the Vietnamese name for Ullambana, and is centred on gratitude to mothers and parents. People wear a red rose if their mother is living and a white rose if she has died.
Uses: Red or white rose
The Buddhist strand comes from the Yulanpen or Ullambana Sutra. In it, the disciple Maudgalyayana finds his mother reborn as a hungry ghost, unable to eat because food turns to burning coal in her mouth, and the Buddha tells him to make offerings to the monks at the end of their summer retreat on the fifteenth day of the seventh month to free her and seven generations of ancestors. The Taoist name Zhongyuan comes from the three Yuan festivals of the Three Officials, and the day flourished under the Tang dynasty.
Stephen F. Teiser's study The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (1988) traces how the festival joined Buddhist merit-making, Taoist rites and family ancestor worship. Unlike Qingming, when families visit graves, the Ghost Festival is when the dead are believed to visit the living, including spirits without descendants. The Japanese Obon and the Vietnamese Vu Lan grew from the same root.
Before Chinese New Year, families send the Kitchen God back to Heaven to report on the household, first smearing honey or malt candy on his lips so his report will be sweet, then burning his paper image.
The household customs of the Lunar New Year that sweep out the old year's bad luck and welcome the new: cleaning before the day, hiding the broom on it, red couplets at the door, the fu character hung upside down, a reunion dinner and red envelopes.
A small, regularly tended shrine where a family remembers its dead with photographs, light, water and offerings, a practice shared in different forms by Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, African, Afro-Caribbean, Mexican and modern pagan households.
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