Chinese Haunts

Let’s get this straight: tonight you will allow your children to gad about after dark, impersonating evil spirits and begging neighbors for sweetmeats? With no attendant loss of face? A wonderful thing, western culture – so free, so capricious, able to turn ancient ritual into consumer-focused romp.

Apparently, your Halloween is a mish-mash of pagan and Christian. For Celtic tree-worshippers, Samhain was the night between summer and winter, a dimension door for the dead. Unable to discourage the practice, the Church added a few saints and a bit of hallowing. Fifteen hundred years or so later, and you have a reason to extort your community with threats of vandalism.

Maybe the extremes of western afterlife, the eternal salvation versus damnation, make the prospect of being a ghost so scary. For us Chinese, there’s nothing very super about the supernatural. We might do some time in Chinese Hell, but even our king of the underworld is little more than a karmic bureaucrat, checking his big book for appointed death times and releasing souls back into re-birth, after the appropriate amount of fake bribe money has been burned.

So the Chinese ghost spends his time much as he did in corporeal form, hungry and looking for cash. Thus do families from Hong Kong to Harbin celebrate the Festival of Hungry Ghosts (Zhongyuan Jie). In fact, the whole seventh month of the lunar calendar is ghost month, an inauspicious time to do anything binding. On the fifteenth, money and joss are burned to fill phantom pockets, and elaborate meals are served on tables with empty chairs for deceased family members.

As for placating non-related ghosts with sweets, well, just as we’ll be the first to tell you there are too many Chinese alive, so are there far too many dead to exercise such misdirected philanthropy. Our ghosts are everywhere! Folksy countryside dwellers even ask the spirits’ pardon first before relieving themselves in open fields. And we certainly don’t want them in our homes. Those raised sills in traditional Chinese doorways serve two purposes: keeping the bound of foot in, and the knee-less out. That’s right, ghosts have no knees.

When it comes to vampires and werewolves, we take our cue from your fervid western imaginations. The scariest spirits we have are those of young unmarried women. The most miserably disempowered creatures while alive, in death they are the avenging wraiths of many a Hong Konga horror flick. Make of that what you will, armchair Freuds.

Thus, while you can imagine a country as old as ours has no end of haunted sites, they’re nothing to get unduly worked up about. Traditionally, we’ve had too many living bloodsuckers and other horrors to spend time scared of the dark. So if you make it to one of the following spooky haunts, and actually see a ghost, just offer a little food or cash. Do that frequently, and you’ll go far in China.

• - Tuen Mun Road, Hong Kong

The original highway to heck, this road has always seen a disproportionate number of accidents and fatalities. Many survivors have blamed ghosts which suddenly popped up out of nowhere, forcing the driver to swerve. Motorists on Tuen Mun are advised not to brake, no matter who appears in front of the headlights.

• - Yu Shan Fan Dian, Cheng De

Yu Shan Fan Dian is a 220-room hotel built on the very same grounds where Manchu royalty would escape the summer heat of Beijing. Over the years, several guests have reported sightings of none other than Dowager Empress Cixi, tending her beloved garden. By all accounts a monumental battleaxe while alive, she’d be one of the few ghosts in China to steer clear of at all costs.

• - Liwan Plaza, Guangzhou

Poltergeist taught developers not to build on ancient burial grounds. Unfortunately, escrow agents for the Liwan Plaza never saw permits for the Qing Dynasty sacrificial chamber, and inspectors failed to notice the eight empty coffins. Unearthed during construction, they were the source of strange noises and mysterious deaths that kept storefronts ruinously empty. Eventually, a Daoist priest informed landlords that the empty coffins had originally been buried to prevent evil influences. The catch was that they were not to be disturbed for a thousand years. Keep your calendar open for Liwan Plaza’s 3008 Grand Re-opening.

• - Huguang Hall, Beijing

During the reign of the Guangxu Emperor, Huguang Hall was a gentleman’s club in which famed intellectuals would sip tea, listen to operas, and outdo each other in rhetoric and debate. One eminent egghead patron, Tan Sitong, was executed nearby at Caishikou, by aforementioned termagant Cixi. Perhaps his ghostly voice was among the phenomena that scared living visitors out of their wits. Wailing and moaning are one thing, but disembodied mutterings about the Analects and government reform? The horror, the horror! A Kuomintang-era businessman bought the place and hired a leprous old watchman, whose misshapen face kept spirits at bay. After his demise, the spooks returned with a pious bent, flinging rocks and loose masonry at lewd or profane passerby. Not the most pleasant way to get stoned.

Related posts:

1. Ancient Chinese Strategy for Modern Chinese Life
2. Those Chinese Text Messages

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