Qing Ming

Yesterday was Qing Ming (written "Ching Ming" in Hong Kong), also known as the "Tomb Sweeping Festival". I got up early to meet my uncle in Sai Wan Ho, then we took a bus to Chai Wan to visit my maternal grandfather's grave. Believe me when I say that I will never do it again.

Throngs and throngs of people queued to get onto buses, packing them to an extent that I had only seen in Beijing. Yes, just like sardines. Traffic was horrible, and the buses wouldn't even stop at the regular stop near the cemetary, so we got off down the road and packed the sidewalks. When we got there, we had to wait for the two other families who lived farther away, one of which was 40 minutes late, the other 1 hour late. Then, we trekked up the hill, but not as far as I expected, to the high-rise residential tower for the ashes of the dead. Oh yes, it was a bloody bloody hot day, and the clouds of incense and smoke from the burning of paper money didn't help.


When you watch Western movies, you see cemetaries with individual grave plots and graves that have proper headstones, all surrounded by an expanse of green grass. In Hong Kong movies, the graves you see are hillside plots that face the ocean. No one I know is buried at such graves. I've seen ocean-facing hillside graves with individual grave plots, and I've seen many around, but I've never had a chance to visit them.

It seems that most Hong Kong people are cremated, and their ashes are interred in stacked 1 foot by 1 foot shelves in multistory buildings. These shelves are covered by marble plates on which there is a photograph of the deceased, as well as some engraved writing that normally indicates name, place of birth, ancestral home, and years of birth and death.


As for Qing Ming, it's a pretty interesting festival with pretty interesting customs. Families would bring food - but not for consumption - for sacrifice. They have to bring incense, paper money, and rice wine. First, the family would place the food they brought at the foot of their ancestor's grace. Then, they'd burn incense sticks and bow towards the grave of their deceased relative. From what I've learned from Hong Kong movies, their spirits get to eat this food for as long as the incense burns. After that, the family goes to a separate spot where there is usually a big cauldron or some sort of large vessel in which there is already a big fire. There, they would burn fake money; in Hong Kong, such money is bilingual. I never paid attention to what it says in Chinese, but in English, it's called "Hell Money". They're usually in large denominations, and often have 6 to 8 zeroes, but yet people still burn stacks and stacks and stacks of it. Trying to buy love, I suppose? In recent years, it's become popular to burn not just money, but also paper models of sports cars, paper tuxedos, paper cell phones.. anything. Oh, some unintended consequences of Qing Ming that are nonetheless characteristic of Hong Kong's Qing Ming celebrations are 1. hillside fires caused by the burning of incense and offerings and 2. elderly people who require paramedics and hospitalization because they are either exhausted from climbing these hills or perhaps due to smoke inhalation.

EDIT: I forgot to mention 'tomb-sweeping'. Sweeping tombs seems to have gotten much easier in recent decades. In the past, graves were a grand affair, and sweeping the area around graves was probably a big hassle. These days, people bring a rag and a bottle of water and simply wipe the marble plate that covers the urn. It took my uncle less than 1 minute!


If I ever become a high-ranking government official, I'm going to recommend two things: 1. I would push for the extension of Qing Ming to a two day festival, in which people with surnames that start with the letters A-M celebrate on the first day and people with surnames that start with N-Z celebrate the second day. 2. rather than burn that much paper money (and some people burn A LOT), I would encourage the printing of even larger denominations (e.g. 1 trillion gazillion Hell Dollars) and would let people burn one note each. If a billion Chinese people around the world each burns an inch-thick stack of paper, how many trees need to be cut down? On the other hand, if there are more and more Chinese youth like me who refuse to celebrate festivals like Qing Ming...