About AncestorBank — Who Burns the Paper, and Where

Floor-to-ceiling painted clay sculpture covering the walls and ceiling of the main hall at Dongyue Temple — Dongyue Temple · HebeiThe brazier is lit on the 1st and the 15th of every lunar month.

We sell paper money and we burn it for people who cannot get to a temple. That is the whole business. What follows is what it actually involves — the building, the paperwork, the fire, and the parts we are not going to pretend about.

The building is not a set

The hall in the photograph above is the one we work in. The sculpture runs from the floor to the ceiling beams — arhats along the bottom row, then tableaux of painted figures above them, then smaller figures packed into the gaps near the roof, hundreds of them, most within arm’s reach of a visitor’s head.

It is old enough that the paint has gone chalky and the gold has worn to the clay underneath. The timber bracket sets under the eaves were never painted at all, and the wood has cracked along the grain in long vertical splits. Nobody restored them. That is not neglect; that is what these buildings are supposed to look like after three or four centuries of hot summers and cold dry winters.

Two things about the place matter for what we sell. It is open on the 1st and the 15th of the lunar month, which is when the brazier is lit and when offerings are accepted. And it is a working temple, not a museum — there is a hinge on the door that gets oiled, a stone floor worn into shallow dips along the path people walk, and ash in the bottom of the burner from the last time.

A row of seated arhat figures in dark robes below a wall of painted clay tableaux — A row of arhats, with the painted tableaux stacked above them. This is the wall beside the offering table.

What happens to an order

People assume there is more ceremony than there is. The sequence is short and mostly clerical.

You send a name and a wish. The name has to be the name the person was known by in life. The wish is whatever you would say if you were standing there — a report, a request, an apology. We do not edit it and we do not interpret it.
We write the petition by hand. Brush, ink, a paper form. This is the part that takes the longest, because a name written in wet ink reads clearly for about four seconds before the fire takes it, and a name written badly does not read at all. If we get it wrong we start again on a fresh sheet.
It goes into the hall on the temple day. The petition and the paper money are set on the offering table together. Nothing is stored overnight and nothing is burned early.
The name is read out, then the paper goes in. Sheet by sheet, not the whole bundle at once. A bundle dumped in the brazier smoulders and leaves the middle unburnt, which defeats the purpose of buying the paper in the first place.
We photograph it and deal with the ash. Photos of the petition before it burns, the fire while it is going, the ash after. The ash goes into the temple’s collection, not a bin.

That is the service. The rest of the site is packaging and postage.

Weathered painted clay relief of a guardian figure riding a green dragon — One of the guardians on the side wall. The green is original; the red was touched up at some point and has since faded further.

What we do not do

This list is here because a lot of sites in this category will not write it down.

We do not read fortunes. Nothing on this site tells you what will happen to you. We are not qualified to and it is not what the paper is for.
We do not say anything is blessed. A pendant that went into the hall with a petition went into the hall with a petition. A pendant that shipped from a shelf did not. The card inside the box says which one you have.
We do not promise outcomes. No cured illness, no recovered debt, no returned partner. If a page on this site ever implies otherwise, it is badly written and you should tell us.
We do not burn for the living. Ancestor money is addressed to the dead. There is no version of this where we write a living person’s name on a petition.
We do not use stock photographs of other people’s families. The hands in our product photos are ours.

Why the prices are what they are

Four price points, and the differences are not arbitrary. Everything is in US dollars and nothing is a subscription unless it says so.

What	Price	What you actually get
Temple Deposit	$12.94	One petition and a hundred sheets of ancestor money, burned on the next temple day. Photos of the petition and the fire.
Temple Deposit Pro	$33	The same, plus video rather than stills, and the burn goes on the date you ask for rather than the next open day.
Ancestor Bundle	$77	Deposit, a full pack of notes, a copy of the petition posted to you, and the ash handled separately.
Burn Club	$333 / year	Both monthly temple days, every month, for a year. For households that would otherwise forget.

The $12.94 is close to cost. It covers the paper, the ink, the temple’s fee, and about twenty minutes of somebody’s afternoon. The margin is in the bundles and the annual, which is why we would rather you bought one of those and we are telling you that plainly instead of hiding it in a tier chart.

A gilded seated figure at the centre of the hall, surrounded by dense painted clay relief — The central figure. Everything else in the hall is built around this axis.

Cracked timber bracket sets under the eaves, unpainted and centuries old — Dougong under the eaves. Never painted, split along the grain, still holding the roof up.

Portrait of a painted clay arhat against a grey brick wall — One arhat, close. The eyebrows are incised, not painted — you only see it from this distance.

Who writes the pages here

The desk is small. The same people pack the paper, carry it in, and write the guides on this site, which is why the guides contain things like the correct way to cut a waxed binding string and not much about the spiritual meaning of the colour red.

Every article is checked twice before it goes up: once against what actually happens on the temple floor, and once against the printed almanac rules that govern which days are open, which way a burner faces, and whose name goes on a petition. Where the two disagree — and they do, mostly on the 49-day versus 100-day question — we write both down rather than picking the tidier one.

If something on this site is wrong, the email address in the footer reaches a person. That is a low bar and most sites in this category do not clear it.

Start here

If you already know the name and the wish, the deposit page takes about two minutes. If you do not know where to start, the prescription form asks six questions and tells you what to burn and when, without charging you for the answer.

Book a temple burn — $12.94
Take the prescription