“Tomb Sweeping” is the festival when the Chinese honor their ancestors. Known as Qingming, the holiday is observed with a day off—this year on April 5th—to visit cemeteries. Traditionally, the Chinese bury their more recently deceased loved ones next to their ancestors, and the roads are clogged on this day with relatives journeying to visit their hometown cemeteries in order to pay homage. In the past, people have burned incense, money and paper houses as part of this ritual remembrance, and now entrepreneurs are offering paper models of iPhones and USBs as well so that people can keep their ancestors up to date with the latest technology. And if you can’t make it to your home town to visit your ancestors’ actual graves, there are now online memorial sites that you can visit all day every day. Another alternative is to hire a “proxy tomb-sweeper” to care for your ancestors with a three-minute visit, costing 100¥ ($16.00).
The holiday has brought a spate of related stories to news programs, chief among them the problem of finding a burial plot. With over 10 million burials a year in China, available land for interment is becoming scarce. To head off a crisis, the government is paying subsidies to encourage people to choose the alternative “eco-burial,” which simply means cremation and ashes used in gardens or spread at sea. The government wants to make such “organic” burials the only option by 2020. As it is, burying and remembering folks is an $11billion business. A burial plot can cost as much as $13,000 in Shanghai and up to $70,000 in Hong Kong, and the waiting time for a plot has stretched from two to five years.
“We can honor the dead in many ways,” the government argues; “as long as the rites are from the heart, it doesn’t matter where or how they take place.” Some have taken the idea of reconstitution beyond simple cremation, making diamonds from loved ones’ ashes and crafting these into jewelry. Now you can be closer to grandma than ever before, they advertise, by wearing her as earrings. True, but can you imagine how you’d feel if you lost one?
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