Ching Ming Festival: what do the dead want in the afterlife this year? Passports, rail tickets, Alaskan king crab and lobster among top sellers in Hong Kong

Following end of pandemic travel restrictions, items connected to travel are proving popular with residents shopping for paper offerings to burn on Wednesday

Pricey food, including seafood and roasted suckling pig, is also being imitated this year, but some worshippers say they still prefer to offer the real thing

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To Chin-sung, owner of a paper offering shop in Sai Ying Pun, shows off a “travel pack” that is a popular choice for the festival. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 12:00pm, 3 Apr 2023Updated: 12:14pm, 3 Apr 2023

Tourism-related items such as theme park passes and high-speed rail tickets, along with pricey foods such as Alaskan king crab and lobster, have emerged as trendy paper offerings being sold for this year’s Ching Ming Festival in Hong Kong.

The festival is a traditional Chinese holiday devoted to remembering and honouring the deceased through tomb sweeping and burning incense and paper goods. The offerings are burned at graves to ensure ancestors enjoy a good afterlife, and each year’s iterations reflect the latest trends or obsessions preoccupying the living.

Some of the paper offerings being sold by the Chun Shing Hong shop in Sai Ying Pun. Photo: Dickson Lee

According to vendors, the items being sold ahead of Wednesday’s festival underscored people’s re-embrace of travel following the end of Covid-19 restrictions.

One popular item is a paper travel pack containing two passports, a home return permit, a high-speed rail ticket, a ferry ticket, an air ticket, a fifth-generation mobile SIM card, a stored-value card called Opportunity in a nod to the ubiquitous Octopus ones and a pass to Walk Distance, a reference to the Walt Disney theme park.

To Chin-sung, who runs Chun Shing Hong, says he expects a double-digit growth in sales this year. Photo: Dickson Lee

“Some people are not buying real items to use for worshipping [such as fruit or meat] as they believe ancestors may not be able to enjoy them, but believe they may receive burnt offerings,” veteran paper artisan Kenneth Mo Cheuk-kei told the Post on Sunday.

Mo, who runs a shop in Yuen Long, said he had stocked up on different paper offerings shaped like food largely imported from mainland China, including pigeons, pomfrets, Alaskan king crabs, lobsters, abalone, roasted suckling pigs and fruits such as durians.