How Hong Kong’s Hungry Ghost Festival Could Rival Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri

Watching Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri from an air-conditioned home in Hong Kong raises an intriguing question: why could Hong Kong’s own month-long Yu Lan Festival not become an equally city-wide celebration?

Gion Matsuri takes place every July at Kyoto’s Yasaka Shrine. Visitors pray for health and protection from sickness, while two grand processions, the Saki Matsuri on July 17 and the Ato Matsuri on July 24, move through the city’s busiest streets. The crowds are colorful, noisy and packed tightly along the routes.

Hong Kong’s Yu Lan, also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival, falls on the 14th day of the seventh lunar month, although some places observe it on the 15th. Its central practice is offering food to spirits who have no relatives or friends to make offerings for them. In return, communities seek peace and prosperity for the coming year.

The festival has no central organizing authority. Local communities arrange their own celebrations, often beginning by building temporary bamboo theaters for Cantonese or Chiu Chow opera. During the festivities, they distribute “Peace Rice” or “Blessed Rice” to older residents and people in need, and hold auctions of auspicious goods. Proceeds are kept for the following year’s festival.

The celebrations conclude with the burning of the Ghost King, a huge paper effigy. Devotees construct a five-meter figure called “Dashiye” from bamboo and paper to represent the king of ghosts, who guards the festival.

Because bamboo scaffolding workers and traditional opera troupes are limited, communities coordinate with one another to set their celebration dates. That decentralized structure gives Yu Lan a strong local character, but the festival’s many neighborhood events have not yet been shaped into one celebration as central to Hong Kong as Gion Matsuri is to Kyoto.