We burn the offering for you, in Hong Kong

Who this is for

People who want to make an offering to their dead and cannot. Usually for one of four reasons:

• You emigrated, and going back for Qingming or the seventh month is not realistic.
• Open burning is restricted where you live. The rules are layered, and the second layer is the easy one to miss.
• Nobody ever taught you how — what to buy, what to write, in what order.
• You know how, but this year you simply cannot.

None of these are moral failures. They are logistics. We handle logistics.

Who we are

A family. Our mother is a 神婆 — a spirit medium. Our younger sister runs the paper offering shop in Hong Kong and does the actual writing and burning. One of us built this website.

That is the whole company. There is no call centre.

Photos and the longer story →

WhatsApp / telephone +852 6073 0264
shenposon@gmail.com
Replies Monday to Sunday, 09:00–18:00 Hong Kong time (UTC+8), every day of the year

Four kinds of offering

These are not product tiers. They are addressed to four different sets of recipients, and which one you need depends on who you have in mind.

For your ancestors (祖先)

Addressed by name to your own dead — parents, grandparents, a specific person you miss. This is the one people usually mean when they say they want to “burn something for my father”.

What we need from you: their name, whether they were a man or a woman — that decides which set of paper clothes goes in — and your own name, which goes on the packet as the sender. The ancestral home is worth having if you know it. A form of address and the anniversary of the death are optional.

Inside: folded gold and silver ingots, loose “stream” paper money scattered along the way, rebirth money printed with a sutra, a sheet carrying a seven-character mantra, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded sheets of gold and silver paper, a set of paper clothes — men’s or women’s, depending on who it is for — and a pair of paper shoes.

For anyone you may have wronged or owed (冤親債主)

Addressed to no one in particular: anyone you may have hurt, owed or fallen out with, in this life or an earlier one.

English sources usually render this as “karmic creditors”, which makes it sound like debt collection. The Chinese term is gentler than that — 親 means a tie or a connection, not an enemy. In practice it works more like a quiet apology to people you can no longer reach.

What we need from you: your name and your date of birth on the Gregorian calendar. Nobody dead is named on this one, so the way the packet identifies who is sending it is your name together with your birth date, both written on the bag. This is the only one of the four that asks for a date of birth — the other three have nowhere to put it, so they do not ask.

Inside: folded gold and silver ingots, loose “stream” paper money, rebirth money printed with a sutra, a seven-character mantra sheet, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded sheets of gold and silver paper, both men’s and women’s paper clothes — since no one person is named, both go in — and a pair of paper shoes.

For all beings (十方眾生)

Addressed to the wandering dead who have no family to make offerings for them. Nobody is named. It is closer to charity than to remembrance, it is not tied to any month of the year, and it is commonly added alongside one of the others.

What we need from you: your name, and nothing else. The top line is fixed — it reads 十方眾生, “the beings of the ten directions” — and your name goes on as the sender.

Inside: the same as the packet above — ingots, loose “stream” money, rebirth money, a seven-character mantra sheet, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded gold and silver paper, both men’s and women’s paper clothes, and a pair of paper shoes.

For a pet (寵物)

Addressed by name to an animal who lived with you. Not filial duty and not charity — this one is closer to saying thank you.

What we need from you: the animal’s name and your own. A nickname or an English name is fine — whatever you actually called them.

Inside: folded gold and silver ingots, loose “stream” paper money, rebirth money printed with a sutra, a seven-character mantra sheet, four kinds of hell banknotes, folded gold and silver paper, and nine small folded lotus flowers. No clothes and no shoes — the shop does not put them in this one.

On the bag: the top line reads 往生寵物 XX, “to the departed pet XX”, and the sender line reads 家人 XX 送, “sent by their family XX” — family rather than owner. That is how our shop writes it; it is not a rule out of a text, and there is no published standard for this one.

Worth knowing before you choose it: the inherited framework has no slot for pets. This is a recent practice rather than an old one, and we would rather say so on this page than after you have paid. The longer, honest version is here.

HK$638 (about US$82) per packet — the same price for all four, the pet packet included. Not four tiers: they differ in who they are addressed to, not in what they cost. Settlement is in Hong Kong dollars; the US figure is a rounded conversion, and a card issued abroad is charged by your own bank at its own rate.

What we cannot show you yet is a payment button. Send the form with the packet and the name on it, and we reply by email with the burning dates and how to pay. Nothing is written and nothing is burned until your payment is confirmed. The order form is here.

What you actually receive

Nothing physical. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the whole difficulty with this kind of service: you pay, and what arrives is photographs.

So here is exactly what we do and do not do:

• We photograph your packet before it is burned, with the names visible. This is the part that ties the offering to you specifically.

• We photograph the whole batch together, at the shop or in front of the burner, with your packet among them. That second photograph is what connects your packet to that particular burning.

• Photographs only — there is no video, and no hands or faces in frame. Where the burning happens, people would rather not have a camera making a scene of it, so we photograph the packets and nothing else. We are not going to promise footage we cannot take.

• We burn in batches, not one order at a time. Writing is done individually for each order; the burning itself happens together with other orders. We would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise.
• We do not promise outcomes. Not luck, not health, not protection. Anyone who does is selling you something other than an offering.

Timing, as far as we can state it honestly: ordinarily burned within about three days of ordering, longer around the festivals — as the owner puts it, people order earlier around the festivals. The shop usually goes to burn once a day, between three and six in the afternoon, Hong Kong time (UTC+8). The fastest we have managed is an order placed in the morning and burned that afternoon — a rush case, not the standard.

The photographs go up on your tracking page within three working days of the burning. The shop opens seven days a week and does not close for public holidays, so a holiday in the middle of that does not add days.

And if something goes wrong: if we misspell a name or burn on the wrong day, we do the whole thing again at no charge — tell us within seven days of the photographs going up. If you change your mind after paying, we do not refund, but the order keeps: it waits and gets burned on a later date of your choosing. Both are set out in section 9 of the terms, and you will see the no-refund line on the order page before you pay anything.

Before you order from anyone

Including us. There are six questions worth asking any offering-burning service, and how willingly they answer tells you more than the price does. We wrote them out here, with our own answers filled in where we have them — and marked where we do not.

Learn first, order later (or never)

Most of what we have written is not about buying anything. If you would rather do this yourself, that is genuinely better — doing it with your own hands always is.