Heritage | Downtown revived with traditional festival

For decades Macau’s old neighborhoods have been celebrating every second day of the second lunar calendar month with feasts, worship rituals and Cantonese Opera, as the date is regarded as the God of Land’s birthday in traditional Chinese folk customs. This year, the day falls on March 21, circling the week around it with celebrations hosted by various neighborhood associations and ancestral temple maintenance bodies.
Located in the central area of the Macau peninsula, the neighborhood at Horta e Mitra has been passing on the ritual for generations at its Fok Tak Ancestral Temple. Mr Lai Tak Heng, an old neighbor who has helped to organize the celebrations since the 1980s, said that the Horta e Mitra area has been the only neighborhood consistently marking the annual celebration over the past three decades.
Organized by the Charitable Association of the Ancestral Temple of Fok Tak at Horta e Mitra, the event will also host a 90 table free feast for the elderly this evening. It will be accompanied by another opera performance, as the finale of this year’s celebration.
The Times visited the traditional festival and found an alley decorated with festive banners and lights. For the last few days a stage was set up beside the temple to showcase Cantonese Opera performances. From last Thursday to yesterday, a total of nine performances were presented by an opera troupe invited from Shunde in Guangdong.
Each performance can attract an audience of more than a hundred people, mainly local elderly residents. Nevertheless, the festival not only gathers the elderly, but also the younger generations that have grown up in the area.
“This is a tradition for the neighbors in Bairro Horta e Mitra to gather together. Many young people who grew up in this neighborhood and went overseas would come back home on this day every year. The participants span for five generations at the feast,” said Mr Lai.
The entire event’s budget is MOP 900,000, which includes donations from many young people in the neighborhood. Mr Lai stressed that the district’s younger generations have been very supportive of the tradition.
Celebrations for this ritual are also being carried out at other major temples dedicated to the God of Land, such as in the Largo do Pagode do Patane. Furthermore, the city’s Cultural Institute has initiated the process for declaring the local folk belief in the Land of God as part of Macau’s intangible cultural heritage.
“Society has changed a lot, resulting in different values and opinions in terms of how to promote this tradition. Some other associations focus more on promoting it as a tourism attraction. We just want to pass on the festival’s entire custom in its complete form to the younger generations,” said Mr Lai.