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CHAN WING HOI
Although the number of persons who walked in the procession was impressive, for it was probably more than 300 at many points, many were in the main on-lookers. This was especially obvious in what I overheard when the procession reached Tai Long Wan. A middle-aged woman made the following comment to her companion: “Come along to the walk and have a good time together.” A young woman asked another, probably her newly married-in sister-in-law, if she had seen the piu-sik before. Someone else made the observation, "There are so many things to see.”
Once back at the main ritual area, the Chiu Chau ceremonial music group started a more elaborate performance, with two girls in colourful costume walking their stylized steps carrying fancy baskets on poles. The performance, I learned later from a Chiu Chau friend, was called Chiu Chau fa-laam (flower baskets) and was typical of Chiu Chau celebrations.
Because of the heavy rain in the morning, the head priest proposed to change the time for posting the participants' names from the time chosen to some time in the afternoon, which, the priest stressed, was the time when the rite took place in the previous celebration. One of the local leaders suggested, without insisting, that maybe the gods wanted the rite to take place at the time chosen, but the priest's opinion prevailed. Two Shek O men whose achievements indicated their lives had been endowed with good fortune acted as laam-bong (recipients of the name list that was said to be granted by Heaven). The ritual for name posting took place between six and seven o'clock in the evening and was followed by two other rites Ying-shing (receiving the gods) and Siu-yau (small offering to the ghosts). I was absent during these rites but learned later from Mr. Leung, a photographer from the Hong Kong Museum of History, that the name posting took place in the rain and there were not many people watching. There were more people reading the document the next morning. Even then, Mr. Leung observed, there were not as many people reading as in the case of the jiu festival of Kam Tin which took place in the previous year in the New Territories.
When I arrived at the ritual site on the last day of the festival at around 3:00 p.m., one of the main rites was already in progress. I