Hungry Ghost Festival 2025
About the Festival
The Hungry Ghost Festival—also known as Zhongyuan Festival (中元节)—is a traditional Chinese holiday rooted in Taoist and Buddhist beliefs, observed on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month. It is a time when the boundary between the living and the dead is believed to be most permeable, allowing spirits to return to the world of the living. Families honor and appease these wandering spirits—especially their ancestors—through offerings of food, incense, joss paper, and ritual ceremonies.
For Chinese American communities, the Hungry Ghost Festival is a time for us to reunite with our ancestors—offering blessings, food, and remembrance as they cross over from the underworld. It is a ritual of healing and honoring, especially for those whose histories have been erased or overlooked. In a society that continues to silence marginalized voices, this festival becomes an act of cultural and spiritual resistance—one that remains deeply relevant today.
By memorializing our ancestors, we remember our collective history—documenting stories of migration, struggle, sacrifice, and resilience. The festival becomes both an artistic and sacred space for honoring our roots, and for channeling care, creativity, and grief into community healing. These traditional practices, rooted in Taoism and ancestral reverence, allow us to cultivate balance between the seen and unseen, the past and the present.
In this spirit, we aim to create intergenerational spaces where children of immigrants can learn the value of ancestral veneration—as storytelling, communication, and a means of preserving cultural knowledge. Proudly celebrating our ancestors is not only affirming, but also subversive; it allows us to confront generational trauma and resist the forces of exclusion that have shaped our histories.
Hungry Ghost Events
As part of this year’s festival, we will lead the community in a series of Taoist rituals for both the living and the dead, culminating in a neighborhood-wide procession of the Ghost King and four-day-long chanting ceremony at our temple. During the procession, there will be an altar set in Portsmouth Square to serve as a gathering place for offering incense and prayers—a site of remembrance, celebration, and spiritual renewal.
In honoring the dead, the Hungry Ghost Festival also affirms life—strengthening family bonds, fostering intergenerational dialogue, and sustaining cultural identity in diaspora. It is both a solemn remembrance and a vibrant cultural expression that continues to evolve while maintaining its core values of reverence, community, and spiritual balance.
Thu, Aug 28San FranciscoLTCA will hold a Zhongyuan Dharma Assembly during the seventh lunar month, offering Taoist rituals to honor and release wandering spirits, and to carry on the traditional Chinese values of filial piety. We also sincerely pray for blessings, protection, and peace for our living relatives.
Sat, Aug 23San FranciscoJoin the Ghost King's entourage in parading around Chinatown during the Hungry Ghost Festival!![[CANTONESE EVENT] The Dao of Hong Kong-Style Jiao Festival: Documentary Screening and Ritual Explanations](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/51d17a_52ade7880fb8419cad453ffc00a7cb44~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_98,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/51d17a_52ade7880fb8419cad453ffc00a7cb44~mv2.jpg)
Sat, Aug 09San FranciscoThis screening features a 35-minute edited version of an original two-hour documentary, commissioned and filmed during the 2015 Jiao Festival held once every decade in Kam Tin, a walled village community in Hong Kong’s New Territories. Presented in a documentary style, the film captures this rare ev