When you order a temple deposit, nothing ships to you. That is the part people email us about first — where is my tracking number — so here is the whole sequence, from checkout to the photos that land in your inbox. No steps hidden, nothing outsourced to “our team in China”: it is the two of us, one furnace, one temple.
The five steps
- Choose the paper and the tier. Pick what should burn: a road-opening passport note, celestial bank notes for currency, or the plain yellow paper that travels with them. Then pick the tier — a single name and wish burned, the pro tier that adds video proof, a full passage set, or the weekly Burn Club if you want a standing arrangement instead of a one-off.
- Write the names and the wish. At checkout, give the name the burn is for, plus the wish or message. Chinese characters, pinyin, English — all of it works. The reader at the furnace reads what you wrote as it is written, so do not polish it. Write it the way you would say it.
- We prepare the packet. Your paper is bundled with a petition copy: the printed record of your names and wish. The address travels with the currency it belongs to, which is the whole logic of the ritual — paper without a petition is a letter with no envelope.
- The burn happens at the Dongyue furnace. The packet is burned at the Temple of the Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak in Hebei, on the 1st or the 15th of the lunar month, or the next open burn day after your order lands.
- Photos come back within five days. You get photos of the packet, the furnace and the reading. The pro tier adds video. The paper itself is included in the price of every tier — you are buying the burning, and the paper comes with it.
What we need from you
Three things, no more: the name, the wish, and a working email address for the photos. If you are unsure how to phrase the wish, one sentence is fine — people have been burning petitions with plain-spoken requests for a thousand years, and the Eastern Peak has heard worse.
Why a temple burn instead of burning at home
Mostly because you have nowhere safe to light a fire, and partly because of sequence. Road-opening paper goes before currency — you clear the road, then you send the money. A temple burn keeps that order without you needing to remember it: the packet is assembled in the right sequence by whoever packs it, and the furnace at Dongyue answers to the authority the gold paper is addressed to. If you want to understand the amounts and the pairing of printed notes with plain joss paper, we wrote that up separately in how much ancestor money to burn, by occasion.
Where to start
The tiers live in Temple Deposits. For a single name and wish, start with Temple Deposit; if you want to watch the sequence, the Pro tier comes back with video. The Burn Club covers the 1st and the 15th of every lunar month for a year, which is the arrangement most of our regulars settle into.
