Relatives at the Kambol graveyard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, burning fake American currency as an offering to ancestors. Credit Luc Forsyth for The New York Times        

In Cambodia, the Ghosts Prefer Dollars

International New York Times | 8 April 2016

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — One recent morning, Suon Sokhum, a colonel in the Cambodian Army, was shopping for gifts for his ancestors.

Qingming, the annual festival to honor the dead, was coming up, and throughout the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, people burn offerings to provide for their ancestors in the spirit world.

At a stall on the southern fringe of one of the city’s oldest markets, he browsed votive wares ranging from traditional red candles to glossy Lexus sport utility vehicles made of cardboard, finally settling on several sets of paper clothing and four neat stacks of replica $100 bills.

Col. Suon Sokhum paid for the presents in local currency, the riel, but said he would never consider offering riel to his ancestors. They, like ghosts and spirits throughout Cambodia, prefer dollars.

“It’s too small,” he said of the riel, which trades around 4,000 to a dollar. “I want a bigger note. If we give the big note, the ancestors can get a lot of money. If we give them small money, they will need so many notes that they’ll go crazy carrying them around.”

So on the holiday this week, along with cardboard cars, cellphones and other supplies their ancestors might need, Cambodians burned millions of fake United States dollars, much to the chagrin of the government.

The government has been trying to wean the economy off dollars, which are used here in tandem with the riel. Riel are usually used for small purchases, and dollars for most other things.

Fake money being burned. Many people, including the dearly departed, prefer to keep dollars, mindful of the local currency’s volatility during previous years of turmoil. Credit Luc Forsyth for The New York Times

The national bank has provided incentives for making deposits in riel and has waged a yearslong public relations campaign to promote its wider adoption.

Still, many people prefer to keep dollars, wary of the volatility of local currency from years of war and political instability.

And the biggest holdout may be the spirit world, where the dollar is king.

“It’s an indication that no one, even the dead, apparently, thinks the riel is regarded in high esteem,” said Sophal Ear, an associate professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College, in Los Angeles, who has studied dollarization in Cambodia.

He said he had vivid memories of burning spirit money with his family as a child. “It’s a kind of wire transfer to the afterworld,” he said.

At the Kambol graveyard on the outskirts of Phnom Penh last weekend, the air smelled of smoke and roasted pigs, and charred bits of dollars and the occasional euro littered the grass.

“The dollar is valuable, so that’s why we pay in U.S. currency,” said Heng Panhawat, a clerk for a law firm, as he and his children tossed stacks of American currency, a fake jade bracelet and a paper iPhone 5 into the flames.

“When I was young, we just paid respect to ancestors with gold paper and did not burn paper money, but now society has changed,” he said. “When something is valuable on the market, we buy it and burn it for the ancestors.”

As economic development has taken hold here and Cambodians have more disposable income than ever before, the tastes of ancestor spirits have taken a turn for the luxurious.

A paper Rolls Royce was among the offerings from a family at the Kambol graveyard. An expanding economy has meant more income for the living and more lavish tributes for the dead. Credit Luc Forsyth for The New York Times

While in the past they drank traditional rice wine, they now crave imported beer and Hennessy Cognac. As bigger and bigger S.U.V.s have choked the streets of Phnom Penh, the spirits have developed a penchant for black Range Rovers driven by chauffeurs.

The cars may appear to be cheap cardboard facsimiles, but that does not diminish their utility in the spirit world, which is believed to be a reflection of this one. In exchange for burning the goods, the descendants believe that they will be enriched in kind.

Khao Sophy, who sells votive goods at the market, said preferences among the spirits clearly mirrored the tastes of her human customers. Over the past few years, for example, credit cards have been introduced, and houses have become bigger. As she spoke, a prospective buyer was fussing over the square footage of the paper mansions on display.

“I’m going to shop around,” the woman said. “I need some garden space.”

As recently as the early 1990s, ancestor spirits were happy to receive gold bars, crepe paper painted gold, to pay for their otherworldly purchases.

But as dollars flooded the country during the United Nations protectorate from 1992 to 1993, ancestor spirits began to evince a preference for American currency, especially $100 bills.

Those who died before the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 still like gold bars, while younger spirits want dollars.

“This generation knows U.S. dollars, so now we give them the dollars,” said Kong Heang, 76, a retired gravedigger, who was sitting by a grave with his family, tucking into a feast of roast pig, cockles and beer, food that had been offered to his ancestors earlier that morning.

And Cambodian riel?

“No, never!” he exclaimed with a guffaw.

A similar process of spirit-world dollarization has been documented in neighboring Vietnam, which also saw an influx of dollars in the 1990s, although the government there has been much more successful in eliminating them.

The anthropologist Heonik Kwon has shown how a more luxurious spirit economy, complete with a two-tiered monetary system in which some deities accepted Vietnamese dong and others preferred American “do la,” sprang up alongside the market liberalization measures of the late 1980s. Those who died in the Vietnam War or ghosts from the former South Vietnam were particularly partial to receiving do la, he found.

Ty Song, a government agronomist, was sitting on a tarp in front of his mother-in-law’s grave as his family prepared a host of offerings: the ubiquitous roast baby pig, a platter of jasmine buds, cans of beer and condensed milk, plump grapes and longan fruits, homemade noodles, pork and eggs stewed in palm sugar, a cage of live birds, and a three-story paper mansion with an Audi parked out front and a grinning butler popping out of the door.

Although the paper goods are burned, the food is usually left out and later consumed by the family, while the birds are set free to create luck.

To accompany this were stacks of fake $100 bills and a fake Cambodian passport, stamped with visas allowing the bearer to travel to Australia, France, Japan and the Netherlands. A realistic boarding pass for a flight from Taipei to Sapporo was tucked inside.

Mr. Ty Song noted that, unlike riel, dollars are widely accepted around the world and can be easily converted to other currencies at money-changing stalls, making it easier for ancestor spirits to travel abroad, a luxury that many Cambodians are beginning to enjoy.

“For dollars, it’s easy to spend them and easy to save them,” he explained. “If we give them riel, it will be hard for them to convert it into dollars and spend it anywhere they go, but if we give them dollars they can spend it anywhere.”

What would they do with their American cash? Mr. Ty Song said he did not want to be too presumptuous in speculating about his forebears’ desires.

“The idea is just for them to have it to spend,” he said. “They have the money in the pocket, and whatever they spend it on is fine.”