Yanluo

Yanluo, or Yanluo Wang, is the king and chief judge of the underworld, Diyu, in Chinese belief, the presiding magistrate over the dead. He is a figure adapted from the Indian Yama, the lord of death, who entered China with Buddhism and was then thoroughly woven into Chinese folk and Daoist tradition and reshaped along Chinese lines. In the developed Chinese conception the underworld is organised, like the world above, as a bureaucracy, a vast administrative system of courts through which the souls of the dead must pass, and Yanluo presides over this infernal government. He is most often identified as the ruler of one of the Ten Kings of Hell, the ten magistrate-gods who each judge the dead in a successive court, weighing the deeds of a lifetime, assigning punishment for wrongdoing in the appropriate hell, and determining the circumstances of the soul's next rebirth.

Yanluo is imagined as a stern judge in the robes and cap of a Chinese official, seated in his court with his registers and his demon-attendants, before whom the dead are brought to account. His role expresses the strong moral dimension of Chinese views of the afterlife, the conviction that deeds are recorded and repaid, and that death leads not to oblivion but to judgement and to a rebirth shaped by one's conduct. The adaptation of the Indian Yama into the Chinese Yanluo, refitted as a bureaucratic magistrate, is a clear example of how Buddhism's gods were absorbed and remade within Chinese religion.

Yanluo's underworld bureaucracy is not only a matter of individual judgment after death; it is tied to a widely observed annual event in Chinese folk religion, the seventh lunar month, popularly called Ghost Month, during which the gates of Diyu are traditionally believed to open under Yanluo's authority, releasing the spirits of the dead, including hungry ghosts with no living descendants to care for them, to wander freely among the living for the month's duration. Families in many Chinese communities mark the mid-point of this period with the Zhongyuan Festival, also known as the Hungry Ghost Festival, offering food, incense and burning joss paper, often folded or printed to resemble money, clothing or other useful goods, understood as a way of provisioning both one's own ancestors and the unclaimed wandering dead so that they do not go hungry or cause mischief during their temporary release from Yanluo's courts.

Custom in many communities also counsels caution during this month, avoiding activities such as swimming, moving house or holding weddings, out of a belief that the wandering spirits make the period generally inauspicious for major undertakings. These practices remain actively observed today across Chinese communities in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the broader diaspora, adapted to local custom in each place, and they give Yanluo's otherwise abstract role as chief magistrate of the dead a yearly, communal dimension: his realm is not only a destination reached once at death but a domain whose gates are collectively marked and managed by the living on a fixed date every year.