Living abroad
What is joss paper, actually?
Written for anyone whose family did this without ever explaining it. There is nothing to be embarrassed about in not knowing — most of it was never taught, only copied. Here is what the paper is, what it is for, and what the various kinds are called.
Paper offerings burned for the dead — gold and silver sheets, folded ingots, spirit money, and the packet they go in. The most useful way to understand the whole thing: the packet is a parcel, the name written on it is the address, and the fire is the postal service. Not a spell.
It is a postal system, not a spell
The single most useful thing to understand first: burning paper offerings is modelled on sending a parcel, not on casting a spell.
The name written on the front works like an address. What goes inside works like the contents. The fire is the delivery mechanism. That is genuinely how the whole practice is structured, and once you see it, most of the details stop being mysterious.
It also explains why the writing is the part that feels high-stakes. If you have ever addressed a parcel badly, you know the feeling — it is not fear of a curse, it is worry that it will not arrive.
The packet, and what goes in it
If you grew up abroad, the picture you have is probably a stack of gold-coloured sheets going into a fire, and that is it. That is only half of it.
The full form is a paper bag with a handle — properly called 附薦袋 (fù jiàn dài), commonly just 衣包 (yī bāo). A typical Hong Kong one has a coloured ground, decorative panels either side, a gold vertical band down the middle printed with red characters and a seal, and gusseted sides so it stands up. Designs vary a good deal between shops, so do not expect the one you see to look like the one your grandmother used.
Inside goes an assortment: gold and silver paper, folded ingots, spirit money, rebirth money, paper clothing, and a pair of shoes.
That last detail is worth sitting with. Not an abstract “offering” — somebody thought to include shoes. That is the register the whole practice operates in.
Two things belong in this box and are not in it yet.
The first is a photograph of what is actually inside one of our sister’s packets, laid out item by item and named in both languages. We have described the contents above from what is sold; we have not photographed our own.
The second is what the seal 靈寶大法司 means as a phrase. Our mother may know, or a priest will. Until one of them tells us, this page says only what we could source.
The kinds of paper you will see
Walk into a paper offering shop and there is a wall of it. Four categories cover most of what you will meet:
- Gold and silver paper — sheets faced with gold or silver leaf. The oldest and most general form.
- Ingots — the same paper folded into boat-shaped 元寶, imitating old currency. Often folded by hand, sometimes by the family.
- Spirit money — printed sheets, sometimes perforated with coin shapes.
- Rebirth money — printed with a Buddhist incantation (a dhāraṇī) rather than a currency design. Different intent: merit rather than money.
Which of these belong together, and which festivals call for which, is a longer subject. If you read Chinese, we have a piece on telling them apart.
The other names it goes by
“Joss paper” is not the only English name, and that matters mainly when you are trying to buy some. incense paper and paper incense are what a lot of Chinese and Vietnamese families abroad call it; spirit money, ghost money and hell money also circulate. A shop that stocks it may list it under only one of these, so searching a single term can make the shop look empty. Where to buy it has the full list of terms to try.
The same trap applies to the festival names. Qingming is the Mandarin romanisation, Ching Ming the Hong Kong and Macau spelling, Cheng Beng the Hokkien one used in Malaysia and Singapore — one day, three spellings.
Two things English sources usually get wrong
“Hell money” is a bad translation that stuck
“Hell money” is the usual English name and a poor translation: it imports a Christian hell that the Chinese idea does not contain. The underworld here is closer to an administrative afterlife — offices, records, procedures — than to a place of eternal punishment.
It is still the phrase sellers use, and you will need it to find a shop. Use it to buy; do not read the theology into it.
It is not primarily about fear
A great deal of English-language writing frames all of this as warding off angry spirits. The register it actually sits in is much closer to remembrance, or to keeping up a habit a parent kept.
Anyone telling you that something bad will happen if you do not do this is selling you something. We will not do that, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.
Who it can be addressed to
Not only blood relatives. One Hong Kong shop sorts its packets into five categories: generations of ancestors, a specific deceased person, a deceased friend, 冤親債主, and pets.
That fourth one is usually rendered in English as “karmic creditors”, which sounds like debt collection and is misleading — 親 in the phrase means a tie or a connection, not an enemy. It is addressed to anyone you may have wronged or owed, named or not. We take the four characters apart here.
The rest matters if your family is not the shape the tradition assumes. Adoptive families, partners, close friends — the practice already accommodates all of them, and has for some time. So do pets, which is why that fifth category exists. You do not need special permission.
If you have read this far and still feel like you would do it wrong: you would not. Families differ enormously in how they do this, and always have. Doing something imperfectly is not the same as doing nothing, and nobody is marking it.
If this would help
We are not here to remind you of what you have not done. We are here to handle something you already wanted to do.
See the offerings