Money is burnt in honour of ancestors

Graves will be swept, food will be offered and paper money will be burnt in honour of their ancestors. The Qingming Festival (Clear and Bright Festival) falls on 5 April this year and is an annual festival celebrated by the Chinese in remembrance of their ancestors.

On the day, which is also known as Tomb Sweeping Day, Chinese families will visit their ancestors’ graves to clear the grave of weed, clean the gravestone, lay down fresh flowers and generally tidy up the place before the offerings begin. Offerings of food are then laid out on the grave and paper money is burnt, so the dead may have means with which to sweeten their afterlife. The family members usually take turns in kneeling in front of the grave touching it with their forehead, before saying a little prayer.

The Shanghai Daily has a nice feature about the traditions of the Qingming Festival.

Side Note

With such an honourable tradition in place, I was sad to learn that the cost of grave plots per square metre in some areas of China has risen to almost double the cost (per m²) of houses. Grave plots have become such a lucrative business that the Chinese government is planning to introduce a new law that requires the show of death certificates, before a plot can be purchased.

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