Across East and Southeast Asia, offerings to ancestors tend to revolve around two intertwined themes: nourishment and symbolic communication. Staple foods such as cooked white rice, rice cakes, and sometimes sticky rice are placed on the altar as basic sustenance, often accompanied by full meals that the ancestor enjoyed in life—meat dishes, vegetables, soups, noodles, dumplings, and sweets. Fresh fruits, especially oranges, apples, bananas, pears, and other seasonal produce, evoke prosperity, blessings, and the natural cycles of life and death. Roasted meats such as chicken, pork, and duck signify abundance and generosity, while noodles may be chosen to suggest longevity and continuity of the family line. Tea and alcoholic beverages like rice wine or other wines are set out as libations, gestures of hospitality that invite the ancestor to partake spiritually in the family’s table.

Alongside these foods, a rich array of symbolic items expresses reverence and maintains a living bond with the departed. Incense—whether in sticks or coils—serves as a subtle bridge between visible and invisible realms, its rising smoke understood as carrying prayers and remembrance. Candles or oil lamps provide light on the altar, suggesting guidance and the enduring “family flame,” while bowls or cups of water embody simplicity and sincerity. Fresh flowers, including chrysanthemums, lilies, and lotus blossoms, are offered for their beauty and purity, marking both respect and the transience of earthly existence. Paper money (joss paper or “hell money”), gold and silver paper ingots, and paper replicas of houses, clothing, and other worldly goods are burned or presented to ensure comfort, status, and material support for ancestors in the afterlife.

The offerings often extend into the intimate sphere of personal memory. Objects that the deceased valued—such as personal belongings, photographs, ancestral tablets, or even cigarettes and similar items if they were used in life—are placed on or near the shrine to affirm that the relationship continues beyond physical death. These gestures show that the ancestor is remembered not as an abstract spirit, but as a concrete person with particular tastes, habits, and stories. Across diverse cultures and regional variations, the pattern remains remarkably consistent: simple staples for sustenance, special foods and drinks for honor, and carefully chosen symbolic items to sustain a relationship that is understood to transcend the visible world.