There was a bunch of “paper money,” spirit money, lying around on the ground around the installation, and people with official-looking vests were busy sweeping it up and collecting it into piles closer to the king of hell himself. The kind of hell stood facing away from the temple and towards several stands that had several different parts of huge, fat, overgrown, slaughtered pig: one of the customs for this ceremony is to slaughter a pig that has won a competition for hugeness, having been fatted at great cost to barely believable proportions. The incredibly fatty pig meat is then chopped up and distributed to the needy. (I think that this may be the ceremony that used to be like a beggars’ carnival: the pig meat and other food offerings were piled up into a comestible mountain and after the ceremony the beggars were let loose onto it, leading always to a certain amount of violence and probably stomach complications. There was no mountain or mob in sight here though. For a comparison of the social role of ghosts to that of beggars—needy beings of the worldly and the supernatural realm who lack a filial and social net to take care of them and to restrain them, and who are therefore to be feared and appeased, but not too much lest they get greedy, check out the really cool, really funny classic article by Arthur Wolf, “Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors” in Arthur Wolf (ed.), Studies in Chinese Society Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.)



pig meat getting readied for distribution