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Published: April 11th 2010
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Keeping the rider happy and dry.
Nothing worse than riding a bicycle in a drizzle of rain... Southern Anhui Provence exists in a perpetually damp environment and so welding an umbrella to the handle bar seems like a reasonable response to a reasonable problem. Our latest adventure began in an old, well-used, sleeper train as we headed south into the southern frontier of Anhui Province. Our first and foremost goal, to visit the esteemed 黄山,
Huang Shan or Yellow Mountain, became a bit more than we had initially expected being that everyone in China seemed to think it was also a good weekend to travel…
Thanks to the P.R. of China national holiday schedule, our most recent three-day weekend was made possible by the annual Chinese holiday of 清明节,
Qing Ming Jie or Tomb Sweeping Day. National holidays make for a most-excellent excuse to enjoy a quick vacation and many of us without so much as a small flash of guilt take advantage of Memorial Day or Labor Day to get in that first/last camping trip or enjoy the outdoors. We found this to be true for each and every one of the few national holidays of China. A large number of Chinese do take time on this holiday to visit the tombs of family members and tidy up after the winter. An equally large number of people, however, make like any corn-fed American on any American National holiday would, and hit the proverbial
Tunxi -- An early morning on Lao Jie
Streets scenes from 'Lao Jie' or Old Street in Tunxi. road, sleep in, or, more simply put, do anything but work. At least half of the aforementioned crowd of Chinese Nationals must have decided on Yellow Mountain as their weekend-warrior destination because the volume of people pushed through gates of the park most definitely met and then far surpassed any reasonable park attendance numbers. The experience of swarming tourists on this scale felt similar to our encounter with holiday-ers in Beijing on the first day of National Week for the P.R. of China’s 60th anniversary since the inception of
Red China’s dominance in 1949.
On
Qing Ming Jie families often visit tombs of loved ones and leave cold, usually bland plates of food as offerings to ancestral spirit - the idea being that many phantoms out there are hungry and by leaving cold, bland food, the hungry spirits will pass the food untouched and the intended deceased family member will not be left hungry. Servings of rice are often presented with a burning stick of incense stuck into the rice - the incense acting as an accelerating agent for segue of nourishment between the natural and the spiritual world. On a side note, foreigners all-too often commit the faux
pas of leaving their chopsticks sticking straight out of their bowl of rice, unknowingly making an untimely donation to the dead. Offerings of many paper items, especially that of printed paper money called
joss paper or
ghost money, find themselves left flaming on grave sites everywhere to be collected on the other side by the spirit waiting. This and the gift of food are executed with the wish of pleasing the familiar ghost who, in turn, will hopefully bless the living family with a good harvest and more children.
The Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco notes that Tomb Sweeping Day is one of the only traditional Chinese holidays marked by the passing of the solar calendar -- -exactly two weeks after vernal equinox or Spring.
Qing Ming, literally meaning “clear brightness,” places a nice bookmark in the calendar year welcoming the arrival of Spring, the metaphorical and physical rebirth of nature, as well as the beginning of the planting season. Arguably the most important and defining Christian holiday, Easter happened to land one day before the Chinese holiday of rebirth and spirits for 2010; the first Sunday after the full-moon following the first day of Spring. Interestingly
Qing Ming Jie makes use of an Eastern tradition which runs in near perfect parallel with Western tradition: the ancient convention of coloring boiled eggs and then cracking them open to symbolize the rebirth of life.
Wikipedia claims that Tomb Sweeping Day dates back 2500 years and officially became cemented into Chinese culture during the Tang Dynasty - in 732 AD an Emperor by the name of Xuanzong declared that respects could only be paid towards ancestors graves on
Qing Ming in effort to curb the practice of “extravagant and ostentatiously expensive ceremonies in honor of ancestors” by China’s wealthy citizens. While Tomb Sweeping Day has enjoyed regular observance unbroken for the past two and a half millennia in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, mainland China has a different story - the holiday based on families taking a day to remember their past loved ones recently sat on hold, at least officially, for nearly sixty years. Starting in 1949 the one-party system governing the modern middle kingdom suppressed observance of the celebration and only in 2008 did Tomb Sweeping Day become recognized as a national holiday.
During the infamous Cultural Revolution and the removal of the Four Olds -
thoughts, cultures, customs, and habits -- the act of visiting the graves of deceased family members and burning fake paper money often landed squarely on the sensitive and finicky nerve of the Red Guard and, as discussed in John Pomfret’s
Chinese Lessons, many elderly folks simply observing a multiple-millennia old holiday quickly became victims to a ruthless force of adolescent hooligans. XinHua News reported in an article dating April 3rd, 2008 “Many hope the first Qing Ming Festival holiday would help restore a long-lost joyous sentiment to the solemn tomb-sweeping day,” I can only imagine the suddenly deemed unacceptable practice during the Cultural Revolution (an event finally ending with Mao’s death) and from that point forward people, especially those with a rural heritage, slowly returned to the tradition sans official blessings from Beijing. By skipping a healthy part of one full generation, this pseudo-recent rough history could perhaps explain why so many Chinese tourists tromping around
Huang Shan seemed more intent on showing off their fake North Face parkas in sixty-degree weather than observing a 2,500 year old tradition of paying one’s respects in the spring.
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Donna White
non-member comment
Thanks!
Tomb Sweeping Day sounds like a remarkable holiday; remembering one's ancestors and caring for them. I'm glad the two of you were able to observe a 2,500 year old tradition. Thank you for the history lesson! I loved your photos!