Ghost month in vietnam

It’s Ghost Month in Vietnam and that means people are making offerings to any ghosts who may be floating about, including those of dead ancestors who may have popped over for a visit.
During Ghost Month, people make offerings to make the ghosts happy (and therefore ward off any possible bad luck). The offerings can be paper items that are burnt to “send” them to the ghosts and/or food.

There’s a range of special “ghost cakes” that have been appearing in our local market this month (the seventh lunar month), although most of the special items only appeared a few days before the actual Ghost Day, the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. 

It’s apparently not good form to eat the ghost cakes so we didn’t even buy any of these pretty pink and green ones.
The ancestor worship shops in the market also have special Ghost Month items in stock. We bought a couple of Ghost Month bundles so we could learn more about this festival.

When we bought the first bundle, Darling Man asked the shopkeeper to explain the various bits and pieces. Then we took the bundle to a temple and a guy burned it all for us. (Happy Ghost Month, ghosts!)

Then we saw a mega-bundle for sale and I could not resist. However, this time around we didn’t ask for an explanation so we don’t know what some of the things are.

Here’s what the full mega-bundle looked like …

And here’s what the various components look like

Let me explain the bits that I know.

The folded up bits of brown paper on the top left- well, we don’t know what they’re supposed to be.

Underneath there’s some folded up money and folded up pieces of paper printed with images of old Chinese coins. This represents hell money (although no one is quite sure what currency is used in hell/on the other side, so a range of currencies and credit cards are available for the ghosts and the ancestors).

The yellow folded up paper on the left is some kind of lucky paper. It’s got Chinese writing all over it but it’s about 1,000 years since China ruled Vietnam and not many people know the exact meaning of these papers. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry, so it’s best to include these lucky papers.

The folded up pieces of coloured paper that I’ve fanned out – well, we don’t know what they’re for.


The next group of coloured papers represents clothes. There’s two types of paper clothes in this bundle. (Obviously it’s for the more stylish ghosts and ancestors.)

Next to the first pile of clothes is a red piece of printed paper …

This represents some body guards, who will help make sure the ghosts get to where they’re supposed to go safely.


In the middle of the main picture are fanned out wads of cash – US dollars and dong – more hell money. US$1,000 and VND2 million, to be exact.

And then on the bottom right is a few taels of gold – always a hedge against inflation.

As well as sending these material-type goods to the immaterial, there’s also food offerings.

This morning as we ate breakfast we saw a table full of ghost offerings – fruit, sugar cane, green mango, cakes and the paper offerings.
The lady of the house offered up a quick prayer and lit some incense.

But what happened next absolutely gobsmacked me.

Before the lady had completely finished lighting all the incense, a crowd had gathered around the table. A millisecond after the final stick of incense was lit, people started grabbing at the food offerings. Within seconds it was all gone and only the paper offerings were left

It was as classy as the violent stampedes at the Boxing Day sales.

After the stampede for free stuff subsided, the lady of the house gathered up the paper offerings and burned them in a small metal bucket on the side of the road.

And so it was happy Ghost Month to the local ghosts in that street!

Ghost Month is known as Hungry Ghost Month in Singapore but my Vietnamese friends tell me that here the ghosts are considered lonely rather than hungry, which sounds a lot less scary in my opinion.