Wish for Good Luck at the Lam Tsuen Well-wishing Festival

Description

This New Year, Tai Po Lam Tsuen is hosting its iconic Well-wishing Festival starting from 17 February to 3 March, from the first to the fifteenth day of the lunar calendar. The stars of the Festival are Lam Tsuen’s Wishing Trees, which attract hundreds of thousands of visitors due to tales of wishes miraculously granted. Previously, people wrote their name, birthday and wish on a wishing placard (寶碟 bou2 dip6), tied it to something heavy, then tossed it onto one of the trees. Legend has it that your wish would come true if the placard manages to hang to the branches.

After Lam Tsuen’s first two wishing trees both accidentally burned down, villagers began practicing the tradition at Lam Tsuen’s two banyan trees. In the 90s, after the tradition was featured in the 1998 TVB series, Till When Do Us Part, the tradition rapidly grew popular and the banyan trees soon fell ill from the large volume of placards. Now, to keep the trees safe and healthy, visitors should hang their placards on dedicated wooden racks or toss them onto the 15-foot tall plastic model of the popular banyan tree.

Though Lam Tsuen (lam4 cyun1 林村) translated literally means Lam Village, it is not a village but a township, as its full name Lam Tsuen Heung (lam4 cyun1 hoeng1 林村鄉) would indicate. The township comprises 26 villages, many of them Hakka communities.