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 
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 
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.
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.
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.
(to be continued)
(Photos by courtesy of and copyrighted to Christopher Guy)
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