Zhongyuan Jie (Ghost Festival)

Chinese folk cosmology holds that for the entirety of the seventh lunar month, popularly called Ghost Month, the gates separating the underworld from the world of the living stand open, allowing spirits of every kind to wander freely among the living before the gates close again at month's end. The fifteenth day, the full moon at the month's midpoint, is treated as the peak of this period and is marked by Zhongyuan Jie, the primary set of communal and household observances. The spirits of greatest concern are hungry ghosts, egui, souls who died without descendants to maintain their ancestor cult, died violently or improperly, or were simply forgotten, and who are believed to wander in a state of perpetual hunger and deprivation, capable of causing illness, accidents or general misfortune to the living out of desperation or resentment rather than deliberate malice in most accounts.

Unlike the household ancestor cult, which is a family's private obligation to its own dead, the Ghost Festival is explicitly communal, since these unattended spirits by definition have no family of their own to feed them, making their placation a shared responsibility of the wider community, temples and neighborhoods rather than any single household.

What Chinese folk religion practices as Zhongyuan Jie on this date represents a historical convergence of at least two formally distinct liturgical traditions that most ordinary participants no longer experience as separate. Daoism observes the fifteenth of the seventh month as Zhongyuan, the Middle Prime, one of three annual festivals marking the birthdays of the Three Officials who govern heaven, earth and water, on which the Earth Official is specifically petitioned to pardon the sins of the dead and release suffering souls.

Buddhism independently observes the same date as Ullambana, commemorating the story of the monk Mulian, who used his spiritual powers to see his mother suffering as a hungry ghost and, on the Buddha's instruction, made offerings to the assembled monastic community to secure her release, a rite historian Stephen Teiser has traced in detail as it developed into a major public festival in medieval China. Chinese folk religion, characteristically syncretic and organized around local temple practice rather than a single doctrinal authority, absorbed elements of both traditions into a single set of observances: burning joss paper and spirit money, setting out elaborate food offerings on streets and altars, floating lit lanterns on water to guide lost souls, and staging opera performances with a front row deliberately left empty for the spirit audience, practices still widely observed across mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.