Be my ghost!

It's that time of the year again. Tonight (Saturday) the Yue (or Yu) Lan (or Laan) festival takes place on Lamma Island. I won't be blogging the "burning" ghost event as I covered it last year - on July 30 (scroll down to see the photos).

However, there is a mystery about the date this year. Although this whole month is dedicated to ghosts (the hungry ghost and lantern festivals), the website DiscoverHongKong has the hungry ghost festival on Day 15 of the Seventh Moon (August 26 to you and me) with no festival at all today (August 18). However, confusingly, there is one tomorrow, the Seven Sisters Festival (or Seventh Goddess Day, Tsat-je), on Day 7 of the Seventh Moon (August 19). Just to make things more confusing, although the site Hong Kong FastFacts agrees that seven sisters/goddess day is tomorrow, it puts the hungry ghost on August 29. The sisters festival has nothing to do with ghosts and is an occasion for Chinese girls and young lovers to break with the constraints of tradition and be openly "romantic". It is also known as Chinese Valentine's Day. This is how DiscoverHongKong describes it:

"The festival has its origin in Chinese folklore dating back more than 1,500 years. The legend features a weaver maid (with six older sisters), who led a lonely life working at her loom throughout the year. Her father, the Heavenly Emperor, felt sorry for her and allowed her to marry a cowherder from across the Milky Way.

After the wedding, she neglected her weaving duties and the Emperor ordered her to return home and visit her husband only once a year - on the seventh day of the seventh moon.

The celebrations centre on religious rites and feature needlework competitions. As part of the worship, young women make offerings to the night sky and the two stars that represent the cowherder and the maid. They usually present fruit and burn joss sticks and incense in the open air, chiefly on rooftops, in backyards and gardens or at Lovers' Stone on Bowen Road in Wan Chai."

So it appears that today isn't a festival at all, not that that is going to stop Lamma's Taoist priests and charmers from going ahead with their ghost burning. And in the run-up to today's event, they have been going round the island playing music designed to scare ghosts away (see photos above), all part of their month-long campaign to banish wandering spirits from the island. I was woken up by the procession yesterday morning and recorded the music, which has a link below . . . best not to listen to it if you're a ghost or spirit though, you may find yourself banished from the Web forever! I also recorded a ceremony that took place in the afternoon and there is also a link to a slideshow of that.

Listen to the music: click here (A 2-3 minute Quicktime file)

Watch the slideshow: click here (A 7-minute Flash movie)

By the way, for the photographically minded, my shots are usually taken with a Nikon D2X camera, but the ones in today's blog and in the slideshow were taken with a 10-megapixel Ricoh Caplio GX100, in my view one of the best small digital cameras ever.