Yu lan sheng hui, the Yulan assembly
A service held around the fifteenth of the seventh month to deliver the unattached dead, known in ordinary speech as the seventh-month half, and also called feeding the dead.
Pronunciation yú lán shèng huì｜Belief and processions｜One entry in the Chaoshan glossary
What it means
The gazetteer calls the day Zhongyuan and does not use the name “Yulan assembly”; the term belongs to later centuries and to the emigrant communities, and means a platform built, clergy called in, and food given out to deliver the dead — on a scale far larger than a household sacrifice.
A paper image of Dashi ye stands before the platform on a bamboo frame, with an incense burner at its seat. The service follows a fixed order — chanting, giving food, sending the dead on their way — and takes most of a day.
When you see it
In the seventh month. Chaoshan has one particularity: many townships divide the whole month between districts and hold the universal deliverance in turn, each on its own date, so something is being held somewhere all month long.
Words easily confused
The Yulan assembly is the full name of the service; feeding the dead stresses the giving away of things; universal deliverance is another common name for the same. Household sacrifice is each family worshipping on its own, and neither the scale nor the organisation is the same.
Custom around Zhongyuan in Chaoshan, part of village mutual aid and sacrifice; this page describes only, and neither endorses superstition nor prescribes behaviour.
Read next: Feeding the dead and the Yulan assembly: how the seventh month is kept.
Same group: feeding the dead, the eight festivals of the year, bai lao ye, king of the orphaned.
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Last revised: 3 November 2026