This Still Happens: Under a Hong Kong Flyover, HK$50 Buys a Beating for Your Villains

At 11pm on March 4, 2026, a stall under the Canal Road Flyover in Hong Kong started beating paper figures for customers who had ordered online. Its operator, a Mr. Lian, told Now News the next day that the stall had worked through the night.

March 5 was Jing Zhe, the "Awakening of Insects" on the traditional Chinese calendar and the busiest day of the year under the flyover. By early afternoon, Yahoo News Hong Kong counted at least 100 people in line, some waiting more than an hour, with the line stretching across to the far side of the flyover toward Russell Street. Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, as relayed by World Journal, reported more than 200 later in the afternoon and waits of nearly 2 hours. Police parked at least three vehicles under the bridge and ringed the waiting areas with orange tape. One British tourist had brought two names: his ex-girlfriend and the Manchester United great Rio Ferdinand.

The ritual is villain hitting, 打小人 in Chinese, da siu yan in Cantonese, "beating the petty person." A practitioner, usually an older woman, writes a troublesome person onto a paper figure and beats it with a shoe. A basic session costs HK$50, a little over US$6.

What happens at the stall

Accounts from the 1970s, 1999, and 2009 differ in the details, and practitioners vary what they do.

The practitioner lights incense at a small altar, often in front of a figure of Guanyin, and reports the client's name and purpose to the deity. The target goes onto a paper figure. Clients with a target give a name, and some bring a picture. In 2025, according to HK01, an American customer brought a newspaper so a practitioner could hit Donald Trump.

The figure goes on a brick and gets beaten with an old slipper while the practitioner chants. When TIME visited in 2009, it wrote one chant down: "I am beating you, petty person! You have air, but you can't breathe! You have feet, but you can't walk!"

Then comes the tiger. A paper White Tiger, yellow with black stripes and a pair of fangs, is fed a piece of raw pork fat to seal its mouth. In the version a practitioner named Chan described to City University of Hong Kong students in August 1999, the beaten figure is wiped across the fat to stop its gossiping mouth, then placed at the tiger's mouth to be bitten. Charms are burned, along with paper that calls in helpful people. Rice and mung beans are thrown in every direction. Two crescent-shaped wooden blocks are tossed until they land in the combination that means yes.

Chien Chiao, the anthropologist whose students recorded the ritual in the late 1970s, noted that the tiger itself is sometimes beaten too. "In still fewer cases," he wrote, "the White Tiger is beheaded at the end of the ritual."

Who counts as a villain

小人 means "petty person." In Chiao's 1986 paper, the petty person is defined "in terms of ego's self-interest." Whoever harms you is a petty person. Whoever helps you is the opposite, a 貴人, an "honorable person" or benefactor, and the ritual calls those in as well. At least one stall under the flyover is named for them.

Locals call the corner under the flyover Goose Neck Bridge, 鵝頸橋. One chant that Chiao's team recorded there covers most of the possibilities:

Beat the petty person at a distance. Beat the petty person nearby. Beat the petty person in the same building. Beat the petty person who may have dined together with her.

A practitioner surnamed Wong, 32 years under the bridge, told Sing Tao Daily in 2025 that more people come to hit mistresses than anyone else. A regular named Yip told Now News in 2026 that he comes every Jing Zhe for the villains at his office, who gossip and stab him in the back.

Fewer people name names. Wong Kat-lei, whose stall at the mouth of the bridge had more than 100 people waiting on Jing Zhe in 2025, told Yahoo that her customers that year all asked for the petty people "of the four directions." She encourages it. "Take a step back and the sky opens up," she said.

Local officials have dropped off the list, mostly. Practitioners told reporters in 2024 and 2025 that hardly anyone asked to hit officials anymore. In 2026, a practitioner Yahoo identified as Granny Au said some customers still ask, and she turns them away. "Ordinary people I'll hit. Officials I won't," she said. "Not worth bringing trouble on myself." Asked whether that was about the law, she said yes.

The same Yahoo reporter found a Mr. Lee, who first came to Goose Neck Bridge at age 12 with his father and has come back every Jing Zhe for 50 years, always around noon, as his father taught him. He is now a Taoist priest at Sik Sik Yuen, and he advises against naming anyone. "Everything has cause and effect," he said. "If I really beat you to death, you think there'd be no retribution? If you and I don't get along, it's because there's a villain between us. The villain isn't you. It's the energy. I come here and hit it away, and maybe afterward you and I end up friends."

What the government says

TIME's "Best of Asia 2009" issue gave villain hitting the category "Best Way to Get It Off Your Chest," and its reporter found Gu Yanzhi, 77, working under the flyover with "an old Rockport shoe."

Hong Kong published its first intangible cultural heritage inventory on June 17, 2014, with 480 items. Villain hitting is not one of the titles. Item 3.16 is "Offering Sacrifices to White Tiger during Insects Awaken Day." The paper the government gave legislators that year said, "This ritual is also known as 'Beating Petty Person.'" The online database now puts it more carefully: "Some people may perform 'Beating Petty Person' on 'Insects Awaken Day' as a folk activity." The item is not on the shorter Representative List.

On May 28, 2025, a legislator asked how the government manages the stalls. The Under Secretary for Culture, Sports and Tourism, Raistlin Lau, answered that the activities under the flyover "are operated all year round in general" and "constitute commercial operations conducted by service providers." The same answer counted nine joint operations between January and May 2025 to clear the stalls' belongings off the sidewalk. Answering follow-up questions, Lau said year-round hitting was completely unrelated to Jing Zhe and that the government would not accredit anyone. The environment bureau added that the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department had no plan to license the ritual.

The legislator Doreen Kong told the chamber, according to the council's record, that she had gone to Goose Neck Bridge herself and paid for a session "because I needed to learn." She reported back that some practitioners know the rite, some pretend to, and some are controlled by syndicates. Another legislator, Johnny Ng, complained that foreign media use the ritual to play up Hong Kong's superstitious side.

How old it is

Plenty of write-ups call villain hitting ancient, including a tour listing on the Hong Kong Tourism Board's own site. The written record does not reach that far. In 1986, Chiao, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote: "To the best of my knowledge, the ritual has not been recorded in the local gazetteers or any other historical documents."

Older residents told Chiao's team that before 1949 the ritual had been common in Dongguan and Zengcheng, in Guangdong. The team's 1984 paper in Chinese records that claim and then notes that there is no documentary proof of it. The earliest written mention Chiao could cite was Marjorie Topley's, in a paper for a Royal Asiatic Society symposium in Hong Kong in 1966.

The tiger has a longer paper trail than the shoe. In 廿載繁華夢, a late-Qing Cantonese novel by Huang Shizhong, a steward explains that a new theater stage carries dangerous energy and needs a priest to perform 祭白虎, the White Tiger offering, before anyone can perform on it. Cantonese opera troupes still do a White Tiger rite on a new stage, and Hong Kong's inventory records that rite too.

Cursing with figures is older still. The historian Barend ter Haar, lecturing at City University of Hong Kong in December 2025, traced villain hitting to "a long Chinese tradition of cursing that can be traced back more than two millennia." The roadside version with the shoe is the part with no record older than 1966 that anyone has cited.

Why Jing Zhe

Jing Zhe is one of the 24 solar terms of the traditional calendar. Hong Kong's heritage database gives the farming explanation and prefaces it with "it is said": spring thunder wakes the insects that damage crops, so people make offerings to the White Tiger, the head of all beasts, to keep the pests down.

Chiao recorded a second explanation. "The White Tiger opens its mouth on this day, and so does the 'petty person,'" he wrote, which made it "both logical and convenient" to fold the two rites into one. His team's 1984 paper describes feeding the tiger pig's blood so it will be full and hurt no one, and smearing raw fat on its mouth so it cannot open to bite.

Why under a flyover

Chiao listed the favored places as "cross-roads, at the bottom of a bridge and on a hillside." The team's 1984 paper in Chinese records two opposite reasons. One says those places draw spirits in. The other says a three-way junction carries enough harsh energy to pin the villain down.

Goose Neck Bridge was once a bridge. Bowrington Canal was cut in the 1850s, under Governor John Bowring, from a stream called Goose Neck. The heritage archive Hong Kong Memory gives the canal as about 650 feet (200 meters) long. Trams crossed it on Hennessy Road.

When the canal disappeared depends on the source. Hong Kong Memory says it was covered after the Wan Chai reclamation of the 1920s. Other accounts put the final covering in the 1970s. The Canal Road Flyover opened over the site in 1972.

Chiao's students did their fieldwork between 1975 and 1978, and by then the sidewalk at Hennessy Road and Canal Road was already a favorite spot. Chiao was careful about its history. A century earlier, he wrote, a stream called Goose Neck had run there under a bridge. "It is believed that people used to hold ritual there. Though no vestige of either is recognizable today, people still come to the spot." In the 1970s, they came on "elimination" days, two or three in each lunar month, and on Jing Zhe. The practitioners his team interviewed had day jobs: "the ones we have interviewed are either restaurant workers or hawkers."

What changed

In August 1999, Chan told the City University students that a session cost HK$50. She averaged more than ten customers a day and earned HK$400 to HK$500 a day, more than a new graduate's wage. In 2025, Wong Kat-lei's stall kept its HK$50 price because the economy was weak. In 2026, Lian's stall said it had not raised its price in years, though Yahoo found some stalls charging more than HK$100.

On March 4, 2022, the eve of Jing Zhe, police taped off the stalls under the flyover and barred them from trading, enforcing the pandemic limit of two people per gathering. Voice of America found Lai, 83, who had ridden an hour to watch and saw nothing. "They've made it like the underworld," he said of Hong Kong. Chung Kim-wah, of the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute, told VOA he suspected the ban was political, and that the government feared crowds chanting to hit the chief executive at the time, Carrie Lam.

On Jing Zhe in 2024, the altar of a practitioner known as Tang Sin-ku caught fire, apparently from a candle, and police helped put the flames out. She told Dot Dot News she would definitely reopen that afternoon.

Some customers never come at all. In 2025, Wong Kat-lei told HK01 she had more than 1,000 online orders for Jing Zhe, started hitting them at midnight, and was still going in the morning. The Standard reported in June 2026 that some Taiwanese visitors book through travel platforms before they arrive and that many mainland visitors come after seeing posts on Xiaohongshu. A visitor from Zhejiang told Yahoo in 2025 that at home "we only burn incense," with no hitting at all. In the same Standard piece, a practitioner surnamed Chiu, described as fifth-generation, said "we pass this down within the family, generation by generation."

Where to have it done

The Canal Road Flyover. The stalls sit along the sidewalk facing the Hennessy Road tram tracks, at the junction with Canal Road West. In the Hong Kong Tourism Board's directions, the walk starts at Causeway Bay MTR station, Exit A, and takes about 5 minutes along Canal Road. There are no official hours. On Jing Zhe in 2026, Granny Au opened at 8am and expected to stay until 11pm or midnight if business held up. No report says whether any stall takes electronic payment, so it's worth carrying cash. Plenty of visitors film, and it's best practice to ask before photographing a client, whose villain is their own business. On Jing Zhe, police ask onlookers not to stand around on the sidewalk.

Fuk Tak Temple, Hung Hom. On Po Loi Street in Kowloon, the temple draws its own Jing Zhe crowd. In 2025, The Collective found kits there for HK$30, with the paper tiger, pork fat, pig's blood, and rice included.

Macau. Macau lists the Jing Zhe White Tiger offering on its own heritage inventory and names a guardian-stone shrine, 石敢當行臺, on 橋巷 in the old city, as its busiest site. Macao Daily News wrote in 2025 that the customs are less popular than they used to be.

Malaysia. Here it is a temple rite, and worshippers mostly stamp on the paper three times instead of beating it with a shoe. Sin Sze Si Ya Temple in Kuala Lumpur drew crowds from 6am in 2024. The Tua Pek Kong Temple in Taiping performed the rite for 350 people by proxy that year. Kuan Yin Teng on Lebuh Pitt in George Town, and Bao An Gong, Tian De Gong, and Cheng Hoon Teng in Melaka, have all held Jing Zhe rites since. Not every temple approves of the shoe. The secretary of Bao An Gong told China Press in 2024 that hitting villains amounts to cursing people, and warned that a curse that fails can land on the one who cast it.

Singapore. Lorong Koo Chye Sheng Hong Temple at 15 Arumugam Road publishes its own guide for the day. Worshippers paste a red "Noble Person" paper on the wall and burn the white "Devious Person" paper. There is no shoe.

The next Jing Zhe falls on Saturday, March 6, 2027. The Hong Kong Observatory puts the start of the solar term at 3:40am.