Hell money

I live in a very authentic area of (otherwise so cosmopolitan) Hong Kong where no English is spoken on the streets, where signs are only in Cantonese and hardly any tourists find their way to.

It is also a neighbourhood of the funeral business. The streets around my house in this corner of Hung Hom are full of shops for funeral flowers, coffins and incense.

The flower shops business is thriving on weekends. This is the time when the streets are filled with a countless number of lavish bouquets ready to be sold or still in the making. The flowers used are mainly white (colour of mourning in Asia) and the bouquets are standing on a high platform made of bamboo stcks. I could try to take some photos of this, but I am sure that in a superstitous Hong Kong this is taboo and would bring me lots of bad luck…

Then there are the coffin and urn stores. These workshops don’t have any doors, maybe just a grid that will be pulled down for the night, so the coffins stacked one on top of the other are there for every bypasser to admire. They are actually different from what I have seen in Europe. Shiny hazelnut brown in colour, their shape is not that of a rectangular box. Rather, the coffins have the shape of a lotus flower with round petals at the top and bottom sides.

But the true cultural eye openers are the incense shops. In addition to incense, they sell everything that you would like your deceased loved ones to have and enjoy – made of paper! The local culture has it that a family gather around a grave and burn these paper products that they have bought for their ancestors. As the smoke goes up to the sky, so do the products. Or at least the thoughts that the family would like you, deceased soul, to enjoy them.

Therefore, in an incense shop you can find the most incredible full life size paper items –  i-pads, i-phones, sets of rolex wathces, toy size sports cars, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent shoes and designer bags, packs of hell money, whether it is US dollars or chinese tenders, shirts and ties – neatly packed just as you would find them in a department store, cans of beer, sets of ready-to-eat lobster meals with a shiny silver paper fork and knife included, blankets, dresses, footballs, basketballs…. The list is just endless. They have anything you could probably think of. Actually, it feels just like getting something from a  Hong Kong market. The resemblance and truthfulness of the paper products is remarkable. The souls must be pleased!