Every year on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, ancestral halls in some villages of the Nine Yeuk alliance in Sha Tin light four-foot-tall bamboo-framed lanterns, known as ding dang, made to celebrate a newborn grandson. Master Yeung Kau, who regularly makes these lanterns for different villages, explains: “A ding dang represents one person, one lantern per boy. But we care about auspicious symbolism: good things should come in pairs. If only one grandson is born in a given year, we would rather not make a lantern at all than have a ‘dan ding’, a lone son without siblings.” 

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Where the Apprenticeship Began: Listening to Football Games on the Radio 

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Inside Siu Lek Yuen's village hall stand several Chinese unicorn heads made by Yeung Kau and his brother Yeung Keung for the Hakka unicorn dance. This time, though, Yeung Kau talks about the ding dang lanterns, something outsiders rarely see. 

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Yeung Kau, now seventy-four years old, is both the village head and a paper-craft master who trained alongside his brother Yeung Keung under Ng Shui-shing, known as Uncle Shui, the village's leading paper-craft master. Whenever a boy is born in the village or elsewhere in Kau Yeuk  (the Alliance of Nine) in Sha Tin, he grows busy towards the end of the year, working to finish the lanterns before Chinese New Year. 

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Siu Lek Yuen is a multi-surname Hakka village, home to fiveclans: Choi, Ng, Yeung, Chow and Wong. The Choi clan is the largest, followed by Yeung and then Ng. The village originally had four ancestral halls, though the Chow clan never built one. Whichever clan has a newborn son, though, keeps the craftsmen busy for a while. When Uncle Shui was alive, master and apprentices made the lanterns together. Around the thirteenth or fourteenth day of the first month, a unicorn dance troupe would come to collect the lanterns and carry them to the ancestral hall. Before the Lantern Lighting Ritualon the day of the Lantern Festival, there was another important step: taking the lanterns first to pay respects at the shrines of the Great Lord, Tai Wong Yeh, and the earth god, Pak Kung. 

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Uncle Shui has since passed away, and the craft now rests with the two Yeung brothers. Yeung Kau recalls,“Uncle Shui's father, Uncle Sau, was also a paper-craft master. Uncle Shui grew up watching him work and eventually took over the family trade. He had five sons of his own, but none of them wanted to learn the craft. We were neighbours at the time: he lived on Fourth Lane and we lived on Fifth Lane. He had a radio at home. There wasn't much entertainment back then, and since we liked sports, we would often go to his house to listen to football games, learning to weave bamboo while we listened to the radio.” 

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A Long Road to Apprenticeship: From Casual Helper to Fully Trained Craftsman 

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That was how it began. At the age of ten, Yeung Kau started learning from Uncle Shui, at first only informally. “I never had a formal apprenticeship ceremony. In the beginning, Uncle Shui just called us over to help, so we went, and we picked things up by watching as we worked.” Yeung Kau explains that everyone starts with the most basic task: shaving bamboo strips. Uncle Shui was a strict teacher, “Scolding you was his way of teaching you. If the measurements were off, he'd scold you until you got them right.” 

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Once he reached adulthood, Yeung Kau went into the catering trade to earn a living, and later ran a business in Chinese mainland. Only in 1994, when he returned to Siu Lek Yuen to make pun choi, the traditional basin meal, did he take up bamboo craft seriously again. Even so, an unspoken rule governed the three men's relationship: while the master was alive, no apprentice could take over his business. By 2017, Uncle Shui was in his old age, and he asked Yeung Kau to make a lantern for him to inspect. After looking it over, he said simply, “You've completed your training.” The following year, 2018, Yeung Kau took on his first independent commission, making a lantern for Pai Tau Village. It wasn't until 2019 that he finally made one for his own village of Siu Lek Yuen. 

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Uncle Shui passed away during the pandemic. Since then, Yeung Kau has focused mainly on making lanterns, while his brother Yeung Keung has taken to unicorn making instead, and the two brothers now divide the commissions between them. 

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Craft and Adaptation: From Hong Kong-Made to Mixed Materials 

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The design of a ding dang varies between communities. Traditional walled-village lanterns are rounder in shape, while Hakka lanterns are slenderer, standing around four feet tall. A ding dang is divided into four parts from top to bottom: the liangmao crown, styled after the wide-brimmed hats worn by Hakka women, the lantern drum, the central section which holds the light bulb and socket and once held an oil lamp, the lotus stand connecting the drum to the base, and the base itself. Yeung Kau inherited Uncle Shui's technique and makes lanterns in a distinctive five-tier octagonal style, meaning the base is eight-sided, echoing the eight trigrams of the I Ching. This design takes more steps to complete than the more common square-based version, and the finished piece looks more elaborate as a result. 

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"The craft depends on precise measurements and balance," Yeung Kau says. "The whole process breaks down into four stages: framing, mounting, colouring and decorating. You usually start by building the leg frame to anchor the whole piece of work, then move on to the drum, which is the hardest part. The drum's measurements go four inches, eight inches, then four inches again, sixteen inches in total to form the drum shape. It has to be exact. Even slightly too little or too much throws off the look." 

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While Yeung Kau has kept the character which Uncle Shui passed down, the craft has quietly changed over the past half century. Oil lamp wicks, once used inside the lanterns, caught fire easily, so bulbs replaced them around the 1980s. Another change involves the lantern bands. Yeung Kau recalls that lanterns once had no such bands at all. Only from the 1970s did lanterns start carrying woven trim, made by a village elder known as Granny Choi. After taking over the craft fully in 2017, Yeung Kau also widened the lantern's base, giving it a steadier stance.

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Nothing reflects the changing times more than the bamboo itself. In his younger years, Yeung Kau often climbed the hills at Shek Ku Lung to cut bamboo. "The bamboo there was beautiful, with long sections between the nodes, so back then, both the material and the craftsmanship for these lanterns were entirely made in Hong Kong." 

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Once he stopped going up the hills, Yeung Kau would instead buy bamboo from hardware shops on Boundary Street in Sham Shui Po. With online shopping now widespread, much of the bamboo comes from the mainland instead. "The two types of bamboo each have their own character," he says. "Mainland bamboo is thinner and narrower, which suits the four straight, long legs of the lantern. Local bamboo is thicker, and can be shaved down as needed, so I still insist on using local bamboo for the central frame and the drum." 

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Passing on the Craft: Competing with Mass Production, Struggling to Find Apprentices 

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The number of lanterns made each year depends entirely on how many boys are born in the village that year. Birth rates have fallen in recent years, but 2024, a Year of the Dragon, brought six lantern orders, which have already been considered a large batch. After finishing the lanterns, Yeung Kau sometimes also has to arrange the basin feast for the families celebrating a newborn son, usually held at midday on the lantern-lighting day to entertain fellow villagers.

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The craft has passed through three generations in Siu Lek Yuen, and like many other items of intangible cultural heritage, it faces real challenges in inheritance. The first is competition from mass production. Yeung Kau doesn't only serve his own village; he takes orders from others too. "Some villages think we charge too much. A ready-made lantern is easy to buy, just a few hundred dollars. Ours are entirely handmade, and we're particular about the materials too." 

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The second challenge is finding apprentices. Yeung Kau admits the craft now stands at a crossroads. "My brother and I haven't actively taken on apprentices. If someone's interested in learning, I'll teach them. My nephew and granddaughter have shown interest and came to observe, but honestly, no one has yet learned the full technique from us. If no one comes forward to learn, Uncle Shui's craft will be lost, so there is a real risk." 

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From Uncle Sau to Uncle Shui, and now to Yeung Kau and Yeung Keung, this craft has travelled through three generations. Both brothers are now growing old themselves, and whether this skill, built up through years of patient handwork, will find another pair of hands willing to take it on remains uncertain.