Skip to main content

Oriental Ghost Festival

Image
By

P1020497 (Medium)

As the West has Halloween, the Chinese has a day to mark the opening of the realms of Heaven, Hell and the living. It is the Yu Lan (literally, Bowl P1020478 (Medium) Orchid) Festival, also known as Chung Yuan (literally, Middle Beginning) Festival, the Ghost Festival or the Chinese Halloween. The festival is on the 15th day of the 7th month in the lunar calendar. It is a month traditionally taken as the Ghost Month among the Chinese, when ghosts and spirits of all kinds take a break from the Hell and roam among us mortals

Unlike the day of yore, festive celebrations on the day of the Ghost Festival now take on a much lesser scale in Hong Kong. The Ghost Festival first appealed to the coolies working as stevedores who were mostly from Shawtao, Luk Fung and Hoi Fung counties. For this reason, bigger whoop-de-doos for the spooks are still seen in some older areas, like the docks on western Hong Kong and the Lower Ngau Tau Kok Estate II (LNII). LNII was featured in our special series months ago which P1020498 (Large)you may be interested if you missed it.

The origin of the Ghost Festival is split into the Buddhist and Taoist versions. The Taoist version has it that the Earth God descended to the earth to inspect the mortals for their deeds on the 7th month. The keen-minded people made haste to put on festivities to cheer the spiritual creatures, which later morphed into the Ghost Festival of today. For the Buddhists, the day to please ghost originates from the Buddhist story generally about a girl saving his mother among the hungry ghosts. Ancestor worship is intrinsic to the day. Simply put, the Ghost Festival is when the religious folks perform rituals to pardon the sufferings of the deceased by way of bribing the hungry ghosts.

P1020481 (Medium)

The most prominent feature indicating the festive celebration is none other than the gigantic pailou, or decorated archway, built on a bamboo  scaffold running the height and length of a double-decker bus. It is placed at the entrance to the venue. Decorated on it are the usual auspicious creatures to the Chinese among which bats, phoenixes and dragons are the most common. Also on the pailou are big Chinese characters saying the year, the place, the occasion and well-wishing.

P1020520 (Medium)Then there are motley pennants dancing to the summer breeze around the site under which the crowds busy themselves with watching the Chinese opera, worshipping the ghosts or bidding for the auspicious items.

P1020540 (Medium)P1020476 (Medium)P1020477 (Medium)P1020479 (Medium)

(to be continued)

(Photos by courtesy of and copyrighted to Christopher Guy)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Low Prices

By
The window shopping some hours ago has almost provoked my AgIDS illness.  Just in case you’re in Hong Kong or are coming here, and have the money to burn (All in HK$/ body only): GX200 = $3,280 GRD2 = $3,380 LX3 = $3,180 G10 = $3,280 Prices are available form a gear shop on the 1st floor of the Mongkok Computer Centre.   Besides these new low prices, I found that Wing Shing Photo (55-57Sai Yeung Choi St., MK Tel: 2396 6886/ 91-95 Fa Yuen St., MK  Tel: 2396 6885) is offering a Sony A700 + Carl Zeiss Lens package for HK$9,980 (hopefully, a bargain will make it some hundreds cheaper).
8 comments
Read more

Final Verdicts: GF2 in Action

By
(The rest of the GF2 review posts can be found here ) It is widely believed that the GF2 is a paradoxical downward-upgrade version of the GF1. So, after all the discussions of its bells and whistles, how does it perform in reality? First things first. Which or what kind of cameras should we measure the GF2 against for that matter? We believe that potential buyers of the GF2, maybe except for serial fad chasers and the diehard loyalists, are attracted by its smallness in size with a larger sensor to achieve better image quality, especially at ISO 800 or above. However, given the less satisfactory handling with for example just one dial, the GF2 cannot assume the place of a primary camera. Put together, these assumptions suggest that the GF2 is more suited to be used as a backup camera for social and street shots. Let's grill the GF2 on this basis. In the Hand An obvious merit of the GF2 is size. It feels much less bulky in the hand than the GF1 or the NX100, and just lik...
2 comments
Read more

Dressing Up

By
(Camera: Ricoh GX200) On the street, a group of Chinese tourists are waiting for probably pick-up. With oblivion to the surrounding, this man changes his vest for an unknown reason to the author taking the opportunity to do a snap shot of the scene of an indecent taste.  The increasingly common sights, or eyesores considered by some, of people squatting in front of shops or in the thoroughfares, together with more billboards written in simplified Chinese, seem to push this international city towards the Chinese characteristics of the Mainland cities. The other day when the author visited the the aquarium and panda's home in the Ocean Park, there were, among the swamps of tourists, conspicuous signs saying, "Keep Quiet" and "Don't Use Flash".  The management of the Park has obviously deployed a much bigger troop of attendants to carry the signs around. On one occasion, one of those attendants was so annoyed that she went up to a tourist and made a big long...
Post a Comment
Read more