Traditional Chinese Folk Customs

Modern children’s material life is rather rich while most of them can own toys, computers, or mobile phones in their childhood. Being a “middle age guy”, I was grown up in the public housing estate and I didn’t have much material enjoyment during my childhood. Instead, it was part of my life to assist the household work apart from schooling and doing homework. I must emphasize that housekeeping is not as boring as you might think. As long as you are curious, you can still learn a lot of knowledge and skills in the process, especially when you have six incense burners in your home.

Growing up in an ordinary family, my parents earned a living by running a small business. I don't know if it was a blind faith or an inheritance from their ancestors, my parents attached great importance to traditional ancestor worship. Being the most leisurely member in the family, it was not doubt that I was assigned with the role to prepare the items and incense candles for the worship.

Let’s me first give you an overview of the six incense burners in my home. In the first place, the "Tudigong” is guarding the front door to prevent wandering ghosts from entering the house and causing chaos. In fact, the "Tudigong” is not a real immortal or god, he is a successfully cultivated soul who helps the household to guard the house. Going to you flat, you will see a three-storey wooden altar cabinet. The upper layer of the cabinet is generally used to enshrine the god or Buddha, where the portrait of Wong Tai Sin was enshrined in my home at that time. For the middle and the bottom layers, there enshrined respectively the ancestors and the “Dizhu Shen”. Literally, “Dizhu Shen” is the landowner of the place and its should be worshipped regularly.

For the last two incense burners, there are respectively the “Zao Jun” in the kitchen and the “Jade Emperor” in the terrace. I believe that many people still remember Mr. Stephen Chow was acting as the “Zao Jun” or “cooking god” who mastered the safety of cooking in the movie “God of Cookery” years ago. For “Jade Emperor”, it is dedicated the god of the sky, who is also considered to be the ruler of Heaven. When I was young, it was my obligation to remember all these spirit tablets to ensure the proper procedure during the worship.

On an ordinary day, seven sticks of incense are prepared in the morning and evening. You may ask why the number of incenses does not match with the number of incense burners? Actually, I don't quite understand this, but I was told that 2 sticks of incense should be incensed to the “Dizhu Shen”. When it comes to traditional festivals such as “Ching Ming” Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, or “Winter Solstice”, much more should be done to prepare for the worship. Generally, my mother would prepare the food used for offerings, such as roasted meat, steamed chicken, and rice. I was responsible for the preparation of tea, white wine, red wine glasses and chopsticks, as well as the incense candles and joss papers.

When talking about joss papers, there is a lot of knowledge in it. As I know, there are as many as eight to ten kinds of joss papers commonly used by the people. The more familiar ones may include the “Xi Qian” as well as the bank notes of Hell Bank with the face values of millions. It seems that the inflation in the underworld is far more serious than that in our world. At that time, I was reminded to clearly distinguish “Gold and Silver” and “ Shoujin” while both are square paper in appearance and affixed with thin metal foil. As the name suggests, "Gold and Silver" are the papers pasted with gold or silver foil. For "Shou Jin", the gold foil is printed with a red Chinese charter "Shou" which means long life.

The former is the gold and silver of the underworld, which is used to sacrifice the dead; the latter is the gold of the immortal world, which is used to worship the gods, that is, “Zao Jun”, “Jade Emperor”, and Wong Tai Sin in my home. When I prepared these items, I not only learn to differentiate the gods, immortals, and ghosts in traditional Chinese culture, but also acquire a skill of origami. Folding pieces of "gold" and "silver" papers into the shape of ingots is only the basic technique; it is my stunt to combine eight pieces of " Shoujin " into a three-dimensional shape like to a Chinese lantern.

During the “Ching Ming” and “Chung Yeung” Festivals, some paper craft and clothing bags will be added to the list of the offerings. Today, paper craft offerings are still popular in Hong Kong. As long as you go to incense and candle shops, you will find that there are many kinds of paper craft, ranging from cars and airplanes, mobile phones and jewelry, and even servants and pets. Among those, what attracted me the most should be the tightly packed paper clothing bags. It is most fascinating while you actually don't know what's inside the bag. Certainly, no one is going to open the bag to inspect its content, and so do I. To spy on the secrets in the bag, you can only carefully observe the clothing bag when it is burning, revealing the appearance of the content layer by layer.

Subsequently, I also acquired the skills in mastering the “fire”. It was heard saying that it would bring bad lucky to the family if the offerings were not burnt completely, I should occasionally use an iron stick to turning around the paper craft to ensure that they were burnt completely. In fact, this action should be mater properly. Otherwise, the fire may either be extinguished or the house will be covered with embers.

When I was preparing the clothing bags, it was the time for me to know more about our family. My father was the youngest son in the family, his parents and five older brothers had already passed away before I was born. Even I have never met these uncles, I could still recognize their names written on their clothes bags and burn them into ashes one by one.

The 7^th of July in the lunar Chinese calendar is known as “Hungry Ghost” Festival. It is said that the gates of the hell will be opened on that day, and lonely souls will wander around the mortal world, needing to be exorcised or comforted. There was a lot of preparation work for this festival. A large number of "Seven Colorful Clothing Papers" should be rolled into the shape of egg rolls, which would become the cloth of the underworld. By burning these rolls, the souls could receive them and make clothing in the underworld. Having said that, most of the "Seven Colorful Clothes Papers" I bought in the past only had six colors. I wonder if there is a "Commodity Description Regulation" in the underworld? In the course of preparation, it demanded not only the craftsmanship of origami, and a clear mathematical mind to equally distribute different colors of rolls to the ancestors, and reserve a portion for offering sacrifices to the lonely souls on the streets.

When I was a child, I only contributed in the above-mentioned customs with a curious attitude, and didn't care much about the meaning of it. When I grew up, I discovered that these folk customs contained many important values and wisdom in Chinese culture. I do not aim to discuss whether there are ghosts or gods in this article, nor does it intend to discuss whether the custom is "spiritual" or "superstition", but the inclusive ideology of Chinese culture and the humility of Chinese people to live with the environment in harmony. We respect the gods and hope to be blessed. For those souls in the underworld, we both feel fear but also tender our sympathy and comfort. These contribute to the dimensions of the immoral world, the human world, and the underworld from top to bottom, and "people" in-between are making a balance between the immoral world and the underworld. This cultural background has also deepened the moral standards of the Chinese people. The sayings such as "gods are only above you three feet long" and " cultivate one's inner virtue " remind us that we must do the right thing, otherwise we may be punished by the gods or we will get suffer in the hell.

In another convenience, when we worship our ancestors, we are connecting with the past, present and future time dimensions. We are grateful for the traditions, wealth and knowledge left by our ancestors, and we care about what "blessings" we can leave behind for our children. This kind of connection from generation to generation constitutes the Chinese culture's concept of valuing family and inheritance. When we worship our ancestors on festivals such as the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Winter Solstice, we hope that our ancestors will be reunited with us and remind us of the meaning of different traditional festivals.

Chinese people like to express their feelings in an implicit way, and parents rarely express their love for their children in words. However, it is not difficult for you to feel the care of your mother when you hear her praying to gods for the wellness of the family. We would never know whether our ancestors could receive the gold or paper craft we burned to them, or, it is only our wishful thinking. Nonetheless, these ceremonies express our concern for our deceased relatives and hope that they can still live a comfortable life in the underworld, and also provide emotional comfort to our own souls. The emotion connection and the meaning contained in ceremonies are even more important.

The culture of a place can only be reflected through the life of the local people. As time passed by, these traditional customs went to a decline. Today, we can still see people worshipping on the roadside during the “Hungry Ghost” Festival. The custom of "burning street clothes" seems to be sustained. However, it is believed that very few families still put incense burners around their homes. The reason for this change may relate to the popularity of Christianity, the younger generation do not agree with the "superstitious" customs. Besides, the living environment in Hong Kong is crowded, and the Fire Services Ordinance would not allow you to place sundries in the corridors to obstruct fire escapes. Eventually, the "Tudigong” has no place to stand. In addition, burning incense and candles during can easily cause fire alarms, and the thick smoke may also lead to the complaints from neighbors and administrators. Some families who are still placing their gods in their homes have switched to using LED lights to replace incense candles. During the “Hungry Ghost” Festival and funerals, the incense shop has ready-made gold and silver ingots folded by workers for purchase, and my origami skills are no longer useful. With the development of information technology, some people have even launched ceremonies such as online fortune stick drawing and online ancestor worship in recent years.

As the folk customs are gradually forgotten by people, most modern children cannot distinguish between ancestors, gods and Buddha. They may not be interested in the stories mentioned in this article, such as knowing ancestors through offering, learning origami, playing with “fire”, or arithmetic. However, I will still share the these stories with my children from time and time, so that they can understand the emphasis of family in traditional Chinese culture; learn the wisdom of Chinese people in seeking to live in harmony with heaven and earth; allow our Chinese culture to be passed down from generation to generation.

Reference:

Book

1. 張琪亞：《民間祭祀的交感魔力：中國民間祭祀文化研究》（貴陽：貴州民族出版社，2003年）。

2. 鄧子健：《香港傳統習俗故事2》（香港：新雅文化事業有限公司，2016年）。

Journal Article

1. 趙群才：〈冥錢流行述略〉，《尋根》第三期（2017年），頁28-31。

Electronic Resource

1. 香港歷史博物館民俗組：〈從紙紮用品看香港民俗文化〉，香港歷史博物館網站（https://hk.history.museum/tc/web/mh/publications/spa_2010-08-23_01.html），2010年發表。（瀏覽日期：2023年2月15日）。