Lau Yan-on puts the finishing touches to an elaborate paper and bamboo model of a house, complete with windows and doors, an outdoor swimming pool and a water fountain.
His workshop in the busy working-class Kowloon district of Hong Kong is brimming with similarly intricate models of sports cars, luxury goods like plasma TVs and mundane everyday items including computers and mobile phones.
By yesterday, however, all these works of art were gone.
Although crafted often by hand and worth up to US$1,300, they were burnt to a cinder in ritual pyres that have been a part of Chinese culture for almost 2,000 years.
Lau, 50, has made a career of crafting models that believers in Chinese Taoist-Buddhist teachings burn as offerings to ward off evil "ghosts."
According to Chinese custom, incinerating facsimiles of luxuries will pass the real things to spirits in the afterlife and distract them from causing havoc during Zhongyuan Pudu (
Zhongyuan Pudu occurs during the seventh month of the Chinese Lunar calendar and is known as the Hungry Ghosts Festival. This year its feast days fall on Thursday and yesterday.
Lau compares the practice to mailing gifts to the afterlife.
"We Chinese people think, everyone works for a lifetime so that they can buy a house," he said. "Even though we can't afford one during our lifetime, people will `post' one to their ancestors. They might also send them a pair of servants to care for them," Lau said.
According to believers, the evil spirits are the ghosts of people who died with no descendants.
Only the dead that are prayed for by surviving family go to heaven, and so by offering gifts to evil spirits it is also believed they can be released from purgatory.
The festival is celebrated primarily in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore but celebrants can also be found wherever there is a sizeable Chinese community.
China's communist government all but banned observance during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. As a result, Zhongyuan Pudu is hardly marked in China.
The origins of the festival can be traced back to the introduction of Buddhism to China in the first century.
The faith clashed with the beliefs of the Chinese, who predominantly followed the teachings of the 6th-century BC philosopher Confucius.
However, the Buddhists adapted their practices to include the Confucian custom of ancestor worship. This proved to be more acceptable to the Chinese.
Different stories exist to explain the origins of Zhongyuan Pudu, but one of the most popular centers on Mulien, a Buddhist monk blessed with "divine sight" who saw his mother suffering as a diseased hungry ghost in hell.
He tried to feed his mother but was unable to because the food crumbled into charcoal. Buddha instructed Mulien to offer his fellow monks gifts of a variety of foods and delicacies on behalf of his mother and his ancestors.
By the monks' acceptance of these offerings Mulien's mother and ancestors were released from hell and ascended to heaven, according to the story.
Even today, food is still offered and at this time of the year it is common to see the burnt remains of fruit, sweets or meat in small communal shrines found in older apartment blocks.
Wealthy observers like to give offerings in keeping with their status. Model-maker Lau was asked, for instance, to create an entire pop band, including instruments and stage, for relatives of Hong Kong singer Anita Mui, who died of cervical cancer in 2003.
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