When to burn joss paper: the 2026–2027 dates

Before the table, one thing that takes the pressure off it: nobody keeps all of these. This is an index, not a set of homework.

Which of them a family keeps usually traces back to a village and a grandparent. Two a year is normal. Qingming only is normal. If you grew up abroad and your household kept one of them, you were not doing an abridged edition — you were doing what that household does.

The dates come from the Hong Kong Observatory’s Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table and the Hong Kong government’s published general holidays, calendar and holiday dates rechecked on 15 October 2026. The calendar sources establish dates, not which rituals every family should keep. Every Gregorian date below is the Hong Kong date; converting is the next section.

2026: September to December

Occasions from September to December 2026, with Gregorian and lunar dates, weekday, Hong Kong public holiday status, and who each day is for

2027: January to October

Occasions from January to October 2027, with Gregorian and lunar dates, weekday, Hong Kong public holiday status, and who each day is for

Public holidays are whatever the Hong Kong government gazettes, and they get adjusted. Before you book a flight or apply for leave, check the Observatory’s conversion table and the government’s general holidays page yourself.

Two of the entries in those tables are not ancestor rites at all, and we have left them in on purpose. The Kitchen God send-off is addressed to a household deity, and it sits so close to New Year that it constantly gets folded in by mistake. Jingzhe is the day associated with the villain-hitting ritual — an adversarial rite, and one we do not offer. Both are in the table so you can place them, not so you can add them to a list.

Converting to where you live

Each date above is a Hong Kong date. This table converts one instant, noon in Hong Kong, into local clock time. Choose the offset in force on the actual date.

Local time when it is noon in Hong Kong

For Qingming on 5 April 2027, Sydney and Auckland have already ended daylight saving on 4 April: Hong Kong noon is 2 pm and 4 pm there respectively. London is on BST, so it is 5 am there.

This is a clock comparison, not the start and end of a Hong Kong date or a ritual deadline. For a remembrance at home, agree on the local date with your family. For a service carried out in Hong Kong, confirm the intended Hong Kong date and its availability first.

What time of day?

The next question is always the hour, and it has to be answered in two halves.

First half: there is no single traditional time, and we are not going to invent one.

The claims online contradict each other — finish before mid-morning, finish before noon, finish before sundown. Three incompatible rules, and we could not trace a source for any of them. Untraceable is not the same as false, but it is not good enough to hand you as a rule to follow.

Second half: drop the question of auspicious hours and the practical answer is obvious.

• At a grave: go by daylight and by the cemetery. Paths, steps and photographs all want light, and cemeteries and columbaria keep their own opening hours, with extra arrangements around Qingming and Chung Yeung. Check what the management has posted. That beats any claim about hours.
• At home: go by when your household eats. Much of the time the offering is the meal — cook, set a portion aside, say something, then everyone sits down. The sequence already works.
• Abroad: go by your own clock. What you are doing at home is the household rite, and it does not need to be synchronised with Hong Kong.

Put plainly: the honest answer to “what time” is usually “when you are free and it suits the household”. This is practical advice; family or religious arrangements may set a specific time.

One thing to keep separate: the three-to-six-in-the-afternoon window mentioned further down is when our shop goes out to burn. It is not a recommended hour for you, and nothing attaches to it.

Each occasion, in one line

The table gives you the dates. The names are another matter, so here is one line each. Skip the ones you know.

The spring cluster

• Spring equinox (21 Mar 2027) — some lineages start visiting graves from the equinox rather than waiting for Qingming, which spreads the crowds.
• Qingming (5 Apr 2027) — the main grave-visiting day of the year, and a public holiday in Hong Kong. What the classical texts say about not being able to get there.
• If Qingming passes and you have not done it — the day passing does not close the door. Local accounts describe different customs; they do not establish a deadline for every family. Check the sources and their geographical scope before applying a rule.

The seventh lunar month

• First day, gates open (2 Aug 2027) — the month begins.
• Fourteenth day (15 Aug 2027) — the day Cantonese households traditionally burn.
• Zhongyuan / Yu Lan (16 Aug 2027) — a date associated with different religious and local observances; the names do not describe an identical ritual.
• Thirtieth day, gates close (31 Aug 2027) — the last day of the month.

How those four differ, and which of them anything actually happens on, is taken apart properly in the seventh-month article.

The autumn cluster

• Autumn equinox (23 Sep 2026) — some families keep the equinox and not Chung Yeung.
• Mid-Autumn (25 Sep 2026 / 15 Sep 2027) — the reunion festival. Some households set out a portion for the dead at home rather than travelling to a grave. What the home version involves.
• Chung Yeung (18 Oct 2026 / 8 Oct 2027) — the autumn grave visit, paired with Qingming in spring. Two halves of one year, not the same thing done twice.

The year end

• Winter solstice (22 Dec 2026) — Cantonese households have a saying that the solstice outranks New Year. It is also the easiest of these to do entirely at home.
• Kitchen God send-off (30 or 31 Jan 2027) — a household deity, not the ancestors. Listed because it sits right against New Year and gets mixed in.
• Lunar New Year’s Eve (5 Feb 2027) — the twelfth month has no thirtieth day that year, so the reunion dinner lands on the twenty-ninth. Chinese Wikipedia lists New Year’s Eve alongside Qingming, Yu Lan and Chung Yeung as the four principal ancestor-offering festivals — which surprises people who think of New Year as purely a food-and-red-packets affair.
• New Year’s Day (6 Feb 2027) — a send-off at the end of the year, a greeting at the start of the next.
• Lantern Festival (20 Feb 2027) — the upper origin, one of a set of three with Zhongyuan and Xiayuan.

Two we have flagged rather than endorsed

The Winter Clothing Festival (9 Nov 2026) and Xiayuan (23 Nov 2026) are both real, long-established observances. What we cannot tell you is how much they are kept in Cantonese practice, because we have not asked the shop and will not answer it from a book.

The first is as literal as it sounds: it turns cold, so clothing is sent. The second is the last of the Daoist three origins. Both are genuine; our uncertainty is about Hong Kong practice, not about the festivals.

The anniversary no calendar has

Everything above is a day the whole world keeps at once. But the date that matters most in a particular household is often one that appears on no shared calendar at all — the anniversary of the death.

No search engine has it and neither does our table. It lives with the family, or on a piece of paper somebody has not taken out of a drawer in a while.

A dictionary definition does not prescribe the size of an anniversary ritual. Confirm family arrangements first. Here is what it actually involves, and what to do if you remembered late.

One practical warning if your family records the anniversary by the lunar calendar: the two calendars do not line up from year to year, so remembering it as “around the middle of March, like last year” drifts a little further off every year. Missing dates and missing names both have workable answers.

If you want someone to do it for you

This is the most practical section on the page, and the one we least want to fudge.

There is no cut-off date. The shop burns what it can, when it can.

What we cannot give you is how many days a festival order takes. That depends on how many people order that year, and we would rather leave it blank than guess.

What can be said, with a basis:

• After payment is confirmed, an ordinary-day order is normally burned within about three days — festivals excepted.
• Around the festivals it takes longer. The owner’s words were simply that customers order earlier at those times.

So the usable version is: look back at the tables, and if the day you want is one of the rows marked as a Hong Kong public holiday — Qingming or Chung Yeung — do not leave it to that week. The shop gets busy from about two weeks before Qingming. Lunar New Year is different: the shop does not burn from the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month to the second day of the new year, so orders in that stretch are burned from the third day.

The checks worth running on any burning service start with exactly this question. Ask us, and ask the others.

What we are not pretending to know

One. The 冤親債主 packet has no fixed day. What we could source is a range — the seventh lunar month — and one date inside it, Zhongyuan on the 15th. The seventh-month rows below name it because they fall inside that range, not because those particular days are singled out anywhere we could find.

Two. Which occasion is the most observed. We have no figures. The “who it is for” column records what we could trace for each day, not how many people keep it — and where we could not trace it, the cell says Not established rather than guessing. We have not counted, and neither has anyone we could cite.

Three. How much the Winter Clothing Festival and Xiayuan are kept in Cantonese practice. Flagged above rather than smoothed over.

Four. How many days a festival order takes. It depends on the year; better blank than a guess.

Five. The correct hour. We could not find one consistent account, so the section above gives you the practical reasoning instead. If you want it exact, the oldest person in your family will beat any website.

Writing it that way costs this page four apparently useful things. We would rather be four things short than one thing wrong.