From appeasing Tai Sui to eating soup on Lunar New Year morning, the rituals that hold a city together
The Rituals of a New Year: How Hong Kong Marks the Turn of the Calendar
Every Lunar New Year, Hong Kong transforms. The neon signs that burn through the night all year round are joined by red lanterns and golden decorations. The air fills with the smell of incense and the sound of firecrackers where they are still permitted. Families that have been scattered by the pressures of modern urban life find their way back to reunion dinners. And the city’s extraordinary capacity for layering ancient ritual with thoroughly contemporary urban life comes fully into its own. The South China Morning Post’s lifestyle coverage for the Year of the Horse 2026 highlighted seven moments that capture this distinctive cultural texture: from the ancient practice of appeasing the Tai Sui – the celestial officer whose malevolent influence must be managed in each new year – to the utterly Hongkonger ritual of eating borscht on the morning of New Year’s Day.
Appeasing Tai Sui: Ancient Practice, Living Tradition
In Chinese folk religion and Taoist tradition, the Tai Sui are a set of sixty celestial generals, each associated with a specific year in the sixty-year cycle. In any given year, individuals whose zodiac signs are in conflict with the current year’s Tai Sui must perform specific rituals to appease the officer and avoid misfortune. For the Year of the Horse, those born in the years of the Rat, Rabbit, and Ox are advised to take particular care. The most common form of appeasement involves visiting a temple – Wong Tai Sin is the most popular in Hong Kong – and participating in a ceremony that involves symbolic offerings, prayer scrolls, and the blessing of a Taoist priest.
Why These Traditions Matter More Now
In a city that has endured the systematic dismantling of its democratic institutions, the suppression of its free press, the imprisonment of its opposition politicians, and the exile of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, the persistence of these ancient folk practices carries a weight beyond their religious significance. They are evidence of continuity. They connect the Hong Kong of 2026 to the Hong Kong of 1950, 1900, and beyond. They belong to the people of the city in a way that no law can easily reach. UNESCO intangible heritage frameworks recognise precisely this function: traditions that carry community memory and identity across generations under conditions of pressure and change.
Hong Kong Borscht: The Colonial Gift That Became a Local Classic
Among the many surprises that Hong Kong’s culinary culture contains for the uninitiated, perhaps none is more startling than the fact that borscht, the beetroot soup associated with Russian and Eastern European cooking, has become a comfort food staple in the city’s Cantonese cha chaan teng diners and bing sutt teahouses. The story of how it got there is a perfect illustration of how Hong Kong has always worked: absorbing influences from multiple sources, transforming them through local ingredients and cooking styles, and making them entirely its own. Russian and Eastern European immigrants, arriving via Shanghai, brought the recipe to Hong Kong in the early and mid-twentieth century. Local cooks adapted it. Over decades it evolved into a distinctively Hongkonger dish: typically less sour than its European original, often featuring a rich tomato-inflected broth, sometimes accompanied by thick slices of local-style bread. To eat borscht in a Hong Kong diner on Lunar New Year morning is to participate in a living cultural synthesis that could have happened nowhere else.
The Cha Chaan Teng as Cultural Institution
The cha chaan teng, Hong Kong’s distinctive tea restaurant that serves a hybridised menu of Cantonese and Western dishes at accessible prices, is one of the city’s most important cultural institutions. The Discover Hong Kong official tourism guide describes the cha chaan teng as essential to understanding local food culture, noting its role as a democratic, affordable space for all classes of society. In recent years, as Hong Kong has changed politically, the cha chaan teng has acquired additional cultural significance as a symbol of the city’s unique hybridity and local identity.
New Year Foods and What They Mean
The Year of the Horse new year table in Hong Kong is layered with meaning. Turnip cake, known as lo bak go, is eaten for its phonetic association with good luck and rising fortune. Nian gao, the sticky rice cake, represents advancement and progress. Fat choy moss, traditionally included in festive dishes, is under pressure from environmental concerns but remains symbolically important. Mandarin oranges are exchanged as gifts, their golden colour evoking prosperity. Each item on the table is part of a vocabulary of hope, a set of encoded wishes shared across generations without needing to be spoken aloud.
New Year in the Diaspora
For the hundreds of thousands of Hongkongers now living in the UK, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, the preparation of these foods and the performance of these rituals in a foreign country carries additional emotional weight. A plate of lo bak go fried in a kitchen in east London is not merely food. It is an act of memory, of resistance to forgetting, of insistence that home remains home regardless of which passport you now carry. The Lunar New Year does not require a government’s permission to be celebrated. It requires only the will to remember.
Wing Sum
Arts, Culture & History Journalist, Apple Daily UK
Contact: wingsum@appledaily.uk
Wing Sum is an arts, culture, and history journalist with professional experience documenting cultural heritage, artistic expression, and historical memory within Chinese-speaking communities. She received her journalism education at a prestigious Chinese journalism school, where she specialized in cultural reporting, archival research, and ethical storytelling.
Her work at Apple Daily and other liberal Chinese magazines and newspapers includes coverage of literature, film, visual arts, and the preservation of collective memory. Wing Sum’s reporting is grounded in interviews with artists, historians, and cultural practitioners, supported by archival sources and scholarly research.
She brings newsroom experience in balancing cultural critique with factual accuracy and historical context. Editors value her careful sourcing and resistance to sensationalism when covering sensitive historical topics.
Wing Sum’s authority is reinforced by sustained publication within established media institutions and adherence to editorial standards governing accuracy and attribution. At Apple Daily UK, she contributes culturally rigorous journalism rooted in experience, research, and professional integrity.
