Tradition. Democracy of the Dead.

Chinese New Year 2026 - Year of the Fire Horse

Tradition is hard to break for the Chinese. 

You can take a Chinese out of China but you can’t take China out of the Chinese. The reason is simply because our culture is very much rooted in the tradition of the old, even ancient, Chinese practices handed down from dynasties, generations, communities and family units mainly from accepting the proven teachings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and Buddha since the Qin Dynasty. 

Depending on how devoted your parents were you’d have been exposed to a lot or a little of the Chinese tradition. There are many rituals rooted in traditions practiced by my family since I was young and I sometimes wish I could relive some of them again especially the more happy and auspicious rituals like;

Pai Tee Kong 

1. Pai Tee Kong on the eve of Chinese New Year.

A prayer table set up on the eve of Chinese New Year at midnight with offerings of fruits, food, joss sticks, candles & paper gold bars. Followed by a string of firecrackers to welcome the new year and scare away monster ‘nien’ at the end of it. The fun part is felt throughout the day when each member of the family is engaged in some form of last minute chore or errand somewhere inside, outside or out of the house. There's never so much hullabaloo any other time of the year than the eve of CNY. As a child, I would thoroughly enjoy the mayhem from the kitchen to the front door prancing out to the garden, adding to the physical and imaginary stress by making mischief all over the house. Tempers would flare as time and fuses are short and the day is long till way past midnight. 

As midnight approaches, the tables spread wide and deep with fully prepared dishes of all kinds covering all meat, poultry, fish and fresh greens of the auspicious kind that can be acquired from all means near or far. It is a feast fit for a king - the king of heaven. What a spread my mother cooked up. She slaved in the kitchen all day, all night and into the morning just to uphold a tradition. How she did it, I don't know but I know she did it out of the immense love in her heart coupled with the fact that she was also a Nyonya of noble birth. Which is always a sure sign the food will be meticulously prepared to guarantee that exquisite taste in every dish.

Wouldn't it be a good thing to preserve that tradition just to keep that memory alive at the same time revel in performing the rituals practiced by our ancestors for centuries with pride and love in our hearts just like how my mother has done. 

Jade Emperor's Birthday

Fire offerings to the Fire Horse

2. Tee Kong See or The Jade Emperor's birthday - 9th Day

The eve of the ninth day of CNY a table set up with offerings of fruits and food, simple or elaborate to celebrate the Hokkien New Year. 

Joss sticks, candles, paper gold bars and other effigies are burnt as well. Then the burning of firecrackers that even rivals the first day. Significant for this particular celebration is the presence of sugar cane stalks to honour the sugar cane plantations that helped hide the Chinese from the Japanese during the war until their liberation of the ninth day. 

This was another day on the CNY calendar to stay up late and celebrate what is probably the most significant day for our clan- the liberation of the Hokkiens from occupied forces to be able to finally celebrate our New Year on the ninth day. And the Hokkiens make it even grander and louder on the ninth day than the actual first day praying and partying at midnight the night before. 

3. Mee Sua soup with hard boiled eggs on birthday mornings.  

This simple ritual has been practiced by my parents since childhood. We didn’t have that as it wasn’t any of our birthdays but we had a special version of Mee Sua prepared with abalone and dried scallops for CNY after the prayers past midnight that night.

CNY Reunion Dinner spread

4. Chinese New Year's Eve Family Reunion Dinner.

Of all the worldly traditions imposed upon ourselves throughout the centuries, I hold that the tradition of family reunion dinner as the most important.

So technically we had a big family reunion dinner in Tampin on the eve, then again on New Year's day past midnight in Port Dickson after prayers, just the three of us. We continued spending time together and partying till the early hours. 

The rest of the New Year was spent just lounging around like lizards on the ceiling and the trees. Blissful were the days and nights spent doing absolutely nothing except eat, drink, talk, listen to music, to nature, to each other, to just chill, rejuvenate and sleep. 

Happy Chinese New Year to you all. 

Xin Nian Kuai Le' 

A Civilisational Challenge: Rome, Han, and the Test Before Us.

History as Confrontation.

Image by ChatGPT

If we are serious about learning from history, then we must stop treating it as comfort and start treating it as confrontation.

The Roman Empire was the greatest empire the West ever produced.

The Han civilisation is the longest continuous civilisation in human history.

One collapsed into fragments.

The other endured through collapse itself.

This is not a curiosity.

It is a challenge.

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Rome was unmatched in power. Law, engineering, administration, military force — it organised the ancient world at scale. It knew how to command. It knew how to build. It knew how to expand.

But when Rome broke, so did the idea of being Roman.

People did not fight to preserve it. They adapted. They narrowed their loyalties. They became Italian, Spanish, Gallic, Frankish. Rome did not fall in flames. It thinned out. Authority weakened, and meaning went with it.

Rome built systems strong enough to rule the world.

It did not build an identity strong enough to survive itself.

That is the lesson most people miss.

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Han China faced a harsher test.

Dynasties collapsed. Emperors failed. Civil wars tore the land apart. Foreign powers ruled China for long stretches of time. By every political measure, the Han state should have disappeared.

It didn’t.

Language endured. Customs endured. Ways of thinking endured. Even under foreign rule, people still understood themselves as Han.

Why?

Because identity did not live only in the state.

It lived in shared judgment — taught, practiced, and expected.

Rome organised behaviour.

Han China trained people.

That difference is everything.

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Now the challenge turns to us.

We are building systems more powerful than any civilisation before us. Artificial intelligence can calculate faster than we can think, predict outcomes we cannot see, and optimise decisions at a scale that feels almost godlike.

We celebrate this as progress.

But here is the uncomfortable question:

Are we building systems that make us wiser — or systems that allow us to stop judging?

Intelligence is no longer scarce.

Judgment is.

Judgment is slow. It hesitates. It carries responsibility. It knows when not to act. It asks what should be preserved, not just what can be improved.

No system can do this for us.

When societies replace judgment with process, authority becomes technical instead of moral. Decisions become efficient but hollow. People comply, but they no longer believe. Trust drains away quietly.

That is how Rome dissolved.

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The lesson of Han China is not that moral systems prevent failure. They don’t. 

Power still corrupts. States still fall.

The lesson is harder:

a civilisation survives only when judgment is carried by people, not outsourced to systems.

That kind of civilisation does not panic when power fractures. It does not lose itself when authority weakens. It adapts without dissolving.

Rome mastered power.

Han China mastered continuity.

We are now being tested on both.

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This is not a question about technology.

It is a question about who we are becoming.

Will we be a civilisation that builds intelligent systems but forgets how to judge?

Or one that uses intelligence without surrendering responsibility?

History will not ask how advanced our tools were.

It will ask whether we knew what had to do to remain human.

That is the challenge.

And it is already underway.