Where to buy joss paper outside Asia

Search these words, not “joss paper”

Searching joss paper on its own will mostly return online marketplaces and articles like this one. The terms that surface actual local shops are different:

• Chinese grocery plus your city — the single most productive search, because this is usually stocked as a grocery line rather than as a religious item.
• Asian supermarket, Chinese supermarket
• incense paper, paper incense — another common way the same thing is listed and searched for. Try both word orders: some listings use one and never the other, so searching only “joss paper” can make a shop look as though it has none.
• Buddhist supplies, incense shop
• joss paper near me, spirit money, hell bank notes — the last is the usual English name and a poor translation, because it imports a Christian hell that the Chinese idea does not contain. It is still what sellers use, so it finds shops. Use it to buy; do not read the theology into it.
• Your nearest Chinese temple or Chinese community association. Even if they do not sell it, someone there will know who does.

Map searches often work better than web searches here, because these shops frequently have no website at all.

One more search-term trap, this time on the festival: Qingming is the Mandarin romanisation, Ching Ming is the Hong Kong and Macau spelling, and Cheng Beng is the Hokkien one used in Malaysia and Singapore. Same festival, three spellings. If one turns up nothing near you, the shop may simply have written it another way.

Where it is actually stocked

Five places worth trying, in rough order of how likely they are to have it:

Chinese and Asian supermarkets. Often a small section near incense, tinned goods, or the till — not a dedicated aisle, and rarely signposted in English. Stock goes up sharply before Qingming and the seventh month, and can be absent the rest of the year.

Chinatown general stores. Where a Chinatown exists, the shops selling cookware and household goods usually carry it.

Buddhist and Daoist supply shops. Rarer, better stocked, and staff who can answer questions.

Temples. Many sell it, and some simply provide it during festival observances.

Online. Widely available, usually sold as hell bank notes or ancestor money. Two cautions: check that what you are buying is not a novelty or party item, and note that having it delivered does not solve the harder problem of where you are allowed to burn it.

What to say at the counter

The difficulty here is not usually that nobody speaks English. It is that the English term is unstable — one shop says joss paper, another says gold paper, another has no English name for it at all.

If you are asking a person rather than pointing at a shelf, 衣紙 is the general word and the one most likely to be understood in a Cantonese-run shop.

One thing not to worry about: not knowing the word is not an embarrassment. The English name for this genuinely is unstable, which is the whole reason the card above exists — pointing at the characters is a complete question in itself.

The packet is the hard part

Let us be exact about what is and is not hard here, because it would be easy to overstate it. The loose sheets are not hard. They travel well, and the large online Asian grocers and the general marketplaces list them — for a US address at least, that part is a delivery rather than a hunt (search results checked 6 September 2026; we read the listings, did not open the sellers’ pages or place an order). Anyone telling you the whole category is unobtainable outside Asia is one search away from being contradicted, and we would rather not be that source.

The packet is a different matter. The bag itself — printed, panelled, with the gold band down the front — is the item we could not find listed by the overseas sellers we searched (searched 6 September 2026; we read the listings only and have not surveyed shops in person). What those listings had was the contents without the envelope.

This matters because the packet is what carries the names. It is the addressing system; without it you have currency and no envelope.

And the step past that is harder again: a packet with the names already written on it. That is not a shelf item — it is written by hand, per order, and the writing is the part that is hardest to arrange from a distance, rather than the paper. What goes on those three lines is set out in what you write on a joss paper packet.

If that is your situation, you have three options: ask the shop whether they can order one in, ask a relative back home to post one, or have the whole thing done where the packets are.

When there is nothing near you

For a lot of people outside major cities, there genuinely is nothing within reach. That is a real constraint, not a failure of effort.

Make the offering without paper. A photograph, tea, incense, food they liked. Accepted within the tradition, and the classical texts are unusually clear that the intention is what carries it.

Ask at a temple. Ask whether they hold a collective observance at Qingming or in the seventh month, and whether names can be added to it — it varies from temple to temple.

Have it done where the shops are. That is us — a family paper shop in Hong Kong writes the packet with your names, burns it, and sends you the photographs.

If you can get to a shop and do it yourself, do that. Folding the ingots at your own table and lighting them yourself is the part of this we cannot send you a photograph of.