Chinese Funeral Paper Money: The Feast of the Hungry Ghosts

Picture a Gold Rush mining town on a warm summer night. Red lanterns sway in the trees. Priests in white robes and pale blue satin caps move through the crowd carrying lighted tapers, chanting, while musicians fill the air with a strange, beautiful clamour — reed pipes, cornstalk fiddles, muffled drums and crashing cymbals. The smell of incense, pork fat and a dozen spices hangs over everything. And in tray after tray, people are setting fire to small sheets of paper money.

This isn’t a scene I invented for Of Gold & Blood. It’s something close to what really happened, year after year, in the Chinatown of Grass Valley, California — and it’s one of the most extraordinary pieces of history I uncovered while writing the series.

What are the Hungry Ghosts?

In Chinese tradition, the seventh month of the lunar year is Ghost Month. For two weeks the gates of the underworld are believed to stand open, and the spirits of the dead roam freely among the living. Most are simply ancestors coming home to visit. But some are “hungry ghosts” — the restless, the forgotten, those who died badly or without anyone left to honour them. Neglect them, and they may bring misfortune on the family and the community in the year ahead.

So the living do everything they can to comfort and appease them. They lay out food — fruit, rice, small offerings of meat. They light incense and candles at home altars and at the temple. And they burn paper.

Why the paper money matters

The burning paper — often called joss paper, spirit money or “hell money” — is the heart of it, and it’s what caught my imagination most. The belief is simple and rather lovely: what you burn here is received there. Send money up in smoke, and your departed loved ones can spend it in the afterlife. Burn paper goods, and the dead are clothed and fed and provided for.

It turns grief into something active. Rather than standing helpless before death, you can do something for the person you’ve lost — settle their debts, ease their journey, keep them from becoming one of the wandering hungry. For a community of immigrant miners thousands of miles from the graves of their ancestors, that act of burning paper money was a way of reaching across the whole Pacific to the family they’d left behind.

The festival came to the Gold Country

Here’s the part that still amazes me. This wasn’t a quiet, private observance tucked away in a back room. In the Gold Rush era, Grass Valley’s Hungry Ghost Festival was a genuine event — so vivid and so well known that crowds travelled all the way up from San Francisco to take part. The Hou Wang Miao temple at the heart of the town’s Chinatown anchored the celebrations, with altars and pavilions spilling out around it, each dedicated to different spirits and deities.

I owe an enormous debt for this material to the work of historian Wallace R. Hagman, whose two books — Chinese Temple of Nevada City and Grass Valley, 1868–1939 and The Chinese Cemetery in Nevada City, California — preserve a world that’s almost entirely vanished now. Without local historians doing this patient, loving work, stories like this would simply be lost.

Where fiction takes over

In Of Gold & Blood, I set one of the series’ most pivotal scenes inside this festival. My singer-sleuth Pania attends with friends, partly to honour the dead and partly hoping to glean information about a missing man — and the festival’s eerie, open-gated atmosphere, with its weeping mourners and roaming spirits, becomes the perfect cover for something very dark indeed. I won’t spoil what she finds waiting in the carriage at the end of the night. But I will say this: the contrast between a community tenderly caring for its dead, and a killer using that very ritual as camouflage, is exactly the kind of collision Of Gold & Blood is built on.

That’s what I love about writing historical mystery. The real history is so rich — so strange and human and moving — that the fiction almost grows out of it on its own.

Want to start the series?

If you’d like to step into this world for yourself, Book 1, Poisoned Legacy, is free. It’s the opening of a ten-book family saga of sweeping frontier mysteries, set in the goldfields of 1860s California — full of real period detail, twisty suspense, and a glimmer of romance.

Get your free copy of Poisoned Legacy here →

Have you ever come across the Hungry Ghost Festival, or seen joss paper burned? I’d love to hear about it — leave me a comment below.