Ritual for the Dead, Hong Kong, China

“With Buddhist influences in Hong Kong, we believe that if we burn something for our dead ancestors they will receive it in the next world/underworld so in funerals we will burn things like, all made of paper of course, like maids, actual life-scale paper Benz, paper IPhones, paper suits, paper clothes. Oh! And probably like furniture and then every year, when it’s the anniversary of my grandfather’s passing away, I would follow my grandmother to his tomb and burn him some new things like radios and iPhones. The paper IPhone is a pretty recent thing so yeah; we burnt him some of that burnt him some new pants and stuff. All of these things that we do is to ensure that my grandfather would have a comfortable life in the afterlife hence the Benz, the iPhones, the maids, the furniture etc. Also, plenty of money, we burn plenty of paper money for him, not the real ones of course. Because all this paper stuff has turned into an art for us, stores actually put a lot of effort making the paper things look good.”