What do you write on a joss paper packet?

The three lines, and what each one does

The whole practice runs on one idea: the packet is a parcel and the writing on the front is the address label. If that model is new to you, it is set out in what joss paper actually is. Everything below follows from it.

Three lines, three jobs.

Line	What it does	Example
Recipient 上款 shàng kuǎn	Who it is going to: honorific, then name	先父陳大文 “my late father, Chan Tai-man”
Sender 下款 xià kuǎn	Who it is from, described as the living	陽居眾子女付 “sent by the living children”
Date	The lunar date of the day it is done	丙午年九月初九 “ninth day of the ninth lunar month”

On the packet they run as vertical columns. Layouts differ from shop to shop, and most printed packets already have the panels marked, so if you are holding one, follow the panels rather than a diagram.

The recipient line

Honorific first, then the name. 先父 is a late father, 先妣 a late mother. You are not expected to know these — they are not words anyone uses in conversation, and there is no reason you would have picked them up.

There are two accepted shapes for this line, and the second is not a lesser version:

• One named person. 先父陳大文 — the honorific and the name of a single ancestor.
• The family line as a whole. 陳門堂上歷代祖先 — roughly, “all the generations of the Chan family”. It needs a surname and nothing else. No given name, no dates, no working out of seniority.

The collective form exists so that families do not have to name everyone individually. It was not invented for people who forgot. If you do not know the name at all, that situation has its own article: I do not know my ancestors’ Chinese names.

One practical point: the shops and forums we have read describe one packet per ancestor, with the collective form as the exception because it is already a collective. We have not yet confirmed this with our own shop, and practice differs. If you want to name your grandfather and cover the whole line, ask us and we will tell you what the shop actually does.

The sender line: two accepted forms

First, the word doing the work. 陽居 means “dwelling in the yang” — that is, still alive. It appears on offering packets and essentially nowhere else, so we are not going to assume you know it.

Now the part where sources genuinely disagree, which we would rather show you than tidy away:

• Some sources say do not write a living person’s name on the packet — put the relationship instead, as in 陽居眾子女付, “sent by the living children”.
• Others say the living person registering the offering does write their own name, or a term such as 眾子 (the sons) or 裔孫 (the descendants).

Both are in real use, and we are not going to tell you which one is correct. It is a choice, so treat it as one.

Worth knowing if you are ordering rather than writing: whichever you pick gets written on a packet; a photograph of your written packet comes back to you with the order. If you would rather your own name were not in that photograph, the relationship-only form is a complete and traditional answer, not a way of dodging.

The date line: lunar, and it is today’s date

Two things go wrong here, and both are understandable.

The date is the day the offering is made. Every example we have carries the lunar date of that day rather than the person’s own birthday or death date. We could not find a source ruling the other way out, so if your family does it differently, that is not an error we are in a position to call. The packet is addressed to someone who has died, so it feels as though it ought to carry their dates; in the examples we have, it does not. Think of it as the postmark rather than the biography.

And it is the lunar date. 丙午年九月初九 is the ninth day of the ninth lunar month in a 丙午 year — which is the Double Ninth, one of the two big grave-visiting days. Written as a Gregorian date it would say nothing about where in the ritual year you are standing.

If you do not follow the lunar calendar, this is the line that feels most out of reach. It is in fact the one that asks least of you: it is looked up, not remembered. There is no version of this where you were supposed to know it by heart.

One thing to check if you are ordering from another time zone: the burning happens on a Hong Kong day, so the date written is the Hong Kong date. If your own date and the Hong Kong date do not line up, decide which one you actually want before you order rather than after.

If you cannot write Chinese

No rule put this obstacle here — it arrived with the alphabet your family started writing in. So, plainly, from the shop that does the writing:

“As long as the person receiving it can read it, it works — Chinese, English or romanisation are all fine, though of course Chinese is the most common and the safest.”

— the owner, 1 September 2026 (translated from Cantonese)

Take both halves of that. Chinese characters are the most common and the safest, so if you can get them — off a memorial tablet, a headstone photograph, an old envelope, an older relative — get them. But a name in romanisation is a name.

So the order to try is:

1. Characters, if you have them or can find them.
2. Romanisation or English, if that is the name you know. CHAN Tai Man off a passport, or the name you actually called him.
3. The collective form, if you have no name at all. It needs a surname and nothing more.

And you do not have to be the one holding the pen. If you order, the shop writes the packet; what you supply is the names and the date, in whatever script you have them in.

Five things that are easy to worry about

Every one of these is easier to worry about than it is to actually get wrong.

1. The handwriting. Nobody is marking it. A shop hand and a shaky hand are doing the same job.
2. A Gregorian date instead of a lunar one. Easy to do if the lunar calendar is not part of your week. If you have already burned one that way, there is nothing to undo and nothing to fix — write the lunar date next time if you would like to.
3. Several ancestors on one packet. The usual practice is one each, with the collective form as the exception. It is a convention about addressing, not a rule about whether you were sincere.
4. The wrong honorific. 先父 and 先妣 are gendered and generational, and getting them wrong is the easiest thing in the world. If you are not sure, the relationship word you actually use is enough to work from.
5. Thinking a packet is a stack of sheets. It is a bag, with things inside it. Which is exactly why it has an address on the front — see what joss paper actually is.