It’s Tomb Sweeping Day (清明节 / qīng míng jié), the time when families go maintain their ancestors’ graves and burn offerings to them. See the links at the bottom for more about Tomb Sweeping Day and the tradition of burning spirit money. These photos are from around our neighbourhood tonight.

According to one of our Chinese tutors, who has a law degree and teaches at Tianda for her day job, among Tianjin’s new April enforcement of previously unenforced laws (like spitting and bikes going through red lights) is a crackdown on street vendors. That includes the little wheelie carts selling spirit money and a surprising variety of other paper offerings.

Burning paper money in the street is not illegal, according to our tutor, but it is discouraged and in some cases grudgingly accommodated (see the propaganda posters in this post). Selling the spirit money, however, is illegal, and apparently they’ve had the obligatory news stories of vendors getting raided, etc.

If they stop letting bikes go through red lights (traffic has been noticeably changing) I’m going to be bummed. I have a couple language school buddies who’ve developed a whole set of terms a la CHiPS for essential bike rider maneuvers in Tianjin traffic. Looks like our days of no-rules, every-person-for-themselves, in-the-way-means-right-of-way bike riding might be numbered.

More about Tomb Sweeping Day and burning money in the road:

• Tomb Sweeping Day
• Sending Winter Clothes to the Dead in Tianjin
• After church in Tianjin, Karaoke party, Burning ghost money
• There’s hell to pay
• Same planet, different worlds

The Bi Gan Temple (比干庙) near Xīnxiāng (新乡) in Hénán (河南) claims 3000 years of history, priceless historical treasures and the two kinds of mythological figures especially beloved by Mainland Chinese: money gods and honest government officials. Click the link or the photos below to read the somewhat gruesome legend and see the photo gallery:

Bi Gan Temple 比干庙 near Xinxiang, Henan 新乡，河南 – 2010 Feb 22

Or maybe Santa Claus is the Western money god…

财神到
cái shén dào
“The god of wealth arrives”

This just went up at the subway station/shopping center that I walk through to get to work (小白楼). He faces a McDonald’s. Chinese New Year’s decorations are going up everywhere.

You can see lots of Chinese money god （财神 or 财神爷） images by doing a google image search for 财神。

For details on the story behind one particular incarnation of the Chinese money god, see Bi Gan Temple 比干庙 near Xinxiang, Henan 新乡，河南 – 2010 Feb 22.

The Frog in a Well Chinese history group blog visits a temple in Xi’an depicting the various specific torments in Chinese Hell. It’s not uncommon for temples to depict Chinese hell with large, grotesque statues. WARNING: disturbingly graphic.

Last night was “send cold clothes” (送寒衣 sòng hán yī), the day in the lunar calendar when millions of Chinese go out to the intersections to send burnt offerings to their ancestors. Here’s the sidewalk outside our apartment complex this morning:

Drawing circles around the pile is part of the tradition, it apparently helps the stuff intended for your ancestor not get mixed with anybody elses’ or stolen:

For better photos and a fuller explanation, see:

• There’s hell to pay
• Sending Winter Clothes to the Dead in Tianjin

Passed some street vendors selling paper clothes and ghost money while on my way to get Muslim food for dinner:

In China there are special traditions for expressing hatred of your enemies. We’d first heard about this kind of thing from our neighbours, who, when making dumplings on a particular holiday, chop up the dumpling filling as if they are chopping up their enemies, and pinch the dumplings closed as if they are pinching closed the mouths of their enemies.

In Hong Kong, having your enemies vicariously beaten is a specific religious service that people pay for. See video here and download a paper from Chinese University of Hong Kong’s anthropology dept introducing and explaining this practice here (pdf) (see pg. 213 – the 3rd page in – for a description).

Tonight it’s time to “send cold clothes” (送寒衣), the 1st day of the 10th month in the lunar calendar, and that means a lot of people are outside in the road right now lighting fires with paper clothes and fake money. The idea is that the paper clothes and money (and paper cars, cell phones, TVs, computers, cows, even secretaries) can be used by dead relatives in the underworld, which basically mirrors this world (thus the need for winter clothes, food, money for bribes, etc.).

Tomorrow morning intersections will be covered in scorch marks and ash and plastic packaging will be blowing around everywhere. Why do so many Tianjiners do this? Apparently there are two main reasons, and being true believers in ancient folk superstitions is not one of them:

1. Fear of the unknown; “just in case.”
   Even though Chinese tradition is full of legends and superstitions, most people don’t really have much in the way of specific, strongly held beliefs regarding the afterlife. They aren’t especially “religious,” and figuring out exactly what they personal believe about everything and why is not necessarily a high priority. But since no one really knows what happens after death, making the small effort to perform this kind of ritual seems more reasonable and safer than not. Especially in light of #2.
2. Expressing filial piety; being a good son/daughter.
   What you as an individual personally believe about the world isn’t the point. Even if you did have specific, strongly held beliefs, it’s expected that you won’t let less-important things like your personal beliefs disrupt family life. People should subjugate their individuality to the felt-needs of the family. “Burning paper money” (烧纸钱) and clothes to send to your dead relatives is really just an arbitrary action assigned by history and culture through which you remember lost loved ones, express your feelings for them, and fulfill what you consider to be a good value: being a filial child.

   In many ways this second aspect can be like a North American who’s lost his wife. He brings flowers to her grave and “talks to her,” even though he has no illusions at all that he is actually communicating with her; it just helps him express his grief and makes him feel better. “Sending cold clothes” and “paper money” is a way for Chinese to also express their own feelings and values. One’s specific personal beliefs regarding death and afterward are distant, secondary concerns and beside the point.

Complicated Spot for People with Convictions
One of our recently-married teachers and her new husband are both Christians and hold specific, important personal beliefs regarding spiritual matters. She’s expecting that her parents will specifically ask her and her husband to join the family trip at Spring Festival to make these types of offerings at their grandparents’ gravesite. They haven’t yet decided how they’ll respond or what activities they will or will not participate in. For them, being able to square their actions with their personal spiritual convictions is a high priority, but so is being good family members, and the potential for causing misunderstanding and friction in the family is high.

Shopping for “clothes”
You can buy paper clothes and ghost money in any local vegetable market at booths selling daily use supplies (soap, plungers, pots & pans, fly swatters, brooms, etc.). At right you can see one kind of paper suit, which cost 1元 ($0.18 CDN) and one kind of “paper money” (纸钱) that looks like play money. The brown sheet with holes in it (above) resembling rows of ancient Chinese coins is the more common form of paper money burned in Tianjin, and 1元 will get you a whole bundle. In Taipei the most popular paper money was yellow with red printing, and scented like incense.

I was in the vegetable market this afternoon when some middle-ages ladies were buying paper suits. They were getting confused over which ones were for women and which ones were for men, and how many of each they needed. The fanciest ones come in packages that imitate a real packaged shirt with the collar standing up and everything neatly folded, with some jewelry and a paper cellphone included, all for 5元 ($0.92 CDN).

“yabaliu,” a Tianjiner I’ve never met who sometimes visits the blog, gave us some helpful information in the comments on the last post, and I’ve roughly translated/paraphrased it here:

On the 1st day of the 10th month in the Lunar Calendar, because the weather is getting colder, people “burn cold clothes” (烧寒衣), meaning paper versions of cold-weather clothes. On that day (tomorrow 08 Oct 29), people will “send cold clothes” (送寒衣) to their dead relatives. Before and afterward people will burn “paper money” (纸钱) as a substitute. Sometimes the cold clothes or paper money is wrapped in an envelope or slip of paper with the ancestor’s name on it.

There’s a fun story surrounding the “send cold clothes” tradition (yabaliu calls it a “classic marketing story”). The Chinese credit a man named Cài Lún (蔡伦) with inventing paper. Legend has it that his little brother Cài Mò (蔡莫) was jealous because the paper he made was worse quality than that of his older brother. So in order to get people to buy his poor-quality paper, his wife faked her death and Cài Mò burnt paper resembling money for her ghost. Then she came back and told everyone that in the underworld, that paper is money and she was able to bribe the king of the underworld into letting her come back to this world. So then everyone wanted the “paper money” to send to their dead relatives.

Aside from sending cold clothes on 十月初一 (10-1) of the lunar calendar, Tianjin has lots of other lunar calender days where you’re supposed to offer paper money to your dead relatives. Other especially important days to do this are:

• New Years Eve, when you spruce up your ancestors’ graves and burn offerings to them (上坟),
• Tomb Sweeping Day (清明节), a special holiday just for the purpose of families going to shàng fén (上坟). Tomb Sweeping Day is during the Cold Food Festival (寒食节), three days around Tomb Sweeping Day when you aren’t supposed to eat any cooked food.
• The “Ghost Festival” (鬼节), the 15th day of the 7th month in the Lunar Calendar
• And also on the anniversary of a relative’s death

All this shows how much Chinese people respect their ancestors. Every year has fixed times that remind people to remember their ancestors.

Even in today’s big cities like Tianjin people retain these kinds of traditional customs and culture. Burning paper offerings on the roads maybe makes air pollution, and fires can be dangerous, but with this kind of tradition, it shouldn’t be prohibited. Instead they ought to think of a way to do it properly, for example designating the extent to which you can burn paper money, or providing each community with a special time, place, and container to burn the paper money.

Official Opinions
There are propaganda posters and paintings in nearby neighbourhoods criticizing this practice: “Don’t recklessly burn paper” (below left) and “Civilized sacrificing/honouring the dead, don’t burn paper money on the side of the road” (below right) — but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone.

Other posters are blunter; the ones against noisy religious rituals say “Don’t do feudal superstitions.” In Taipei burning offerings was done every 15 days, during the day, out in the open in special containers (photos here). In Tianjin, people do it at night in the dark, and not as often. I’ve heard that in some areas local neighbourhood committees set up a big container for everyone to use, but apparently part of the tradition/superstition is that the money you burn can be “stolen” by other people’s dead relatives’ ghosts, so people don’t want to mix their ashes.

This is the scene immediately after the Sunday morning service concludes at Tianjin’s Shānxī Lù church; people have to wait for some personal prayer space at the altar:

Shānxī Lù is a TSPM church (Three-Self Patriotic Movement). These kinds of Chinese churches are also sometimes called registered churches, official churches, or government churches, depending on the bias of the author. Here’s an official version of what that means: China’s Protestant Churches to Adhere to “Three-Self” Principles. This church seats several hundred, and it’s been full each of the couple times I dropped in.

Karaoke Party with the teachers!
We sang karaoke for FOUR HOURS this afternoon with some of our teachers and classmates. Tons of fun, and our throats are sore now. I’d include a video clip of one of our teachers singing Wannabe by the Spice Girls, but she’d probably kill me. We sang a mix of Chinese and English songs. I once read somewhere that one of the reasons Mainlanders love karaoke so much is because it’s one of the few places where they get to explicitly verbally express romantic feelings. On the way out we passed a room where a middle-aged businessman was totally rocking out to some love ballad.

Burning Day
Riding back from the karaoke place we discovered that it’s another burning night, when the neighbours send ghost money to their dead relatives. This was taken right outside our apartment building:

See “There’s hell to pay” or the related links below for more about burning stuff for dead relatives.

Around 9:45 last night a group of 20 or 30 people — some neighbours and their relatives — wearing white turbans and some in all white clothes, casually and loudly picked up the flower stands, paper-mâché cow, and the litter, marched out into the middle of the nearest intersection and burned it all. It’s a Tianjin funeral:

The ribbon is kind of hard to translate, but it’s sort of like a card you’d give someone at a funeral, something like: “from Elder Brother Diǎn of the next generation with deep condolences” (晚辈点哥敬挽 / wǎn bèi diǎn gē jìng wǎn).

Each place in China has its own variations of funeral customs. We see this occasionally in Tianjin, though this is the first time it’s been right next door to us. These photos are of stairwell 3, taken from our stairwell (stairwell 4).

We watched them haul everything off to the intersection from our our kitchen yáng tái （阳台） window (they were right below). It’s not a solemn or formal procession; the flower stands are held any which way (flowers falling out all over) and people yelling, “Hey, grab that, let’s get going!” There were also firecrackers this morning around 7am, as is usual for Tianjin funerals.

I took these photos yesterday morning a little before 8am, so it was still a little dark.

It’s my understanding that publicly displaying respect for the deceased is the main point of it all. The details of the rituals and personally believing or not believing in the traditional superstitions (迷信) apparently isn’t what matters most to the participants.

See the related articles below, especially “There’s hell to pay” for more info and photos on why people burn stuff in the roads for their dead relatives.

One of my interviewees recently said,

…the Chinese people are extremely concerned with [the Olympics], however, Heaven isn’t helping out. After the Great Sichuan Earthquake happened, a lot of Chinese people lost confidence.

This is apparently a rather widespread, popular sentiment. Lately there’s been an unusual amount of firecrackers going off, especially in the evenings. It’s normal to hear the occasional wedding or funeral, but for the last two weeks or so it’s been more often than usual. So we asked around, and it turns out there are two different current firecracker-lighting concerns.

We only have sketchy details on the first one. Apparently this is the time of year when the Ghost King (鬼王) of Hades (阎王) – or something along those lines – comes to steal people’s virgins/children/unmarrieds (not so clear on the details). Parents are giving their children peaches to eat because “peach” (桃子) sounds like “escape” (逃), and they’re lighting off firecrackers to scare away the evil spirits.

But this year there are are additional firecrackers. People are trying to ward off China’s bad luck (运气). Rumours are circulating via text messages and the internet about how this is such an ill-fated year for China, with so many disasters coming in a year with so much at stake (all the national face and worldwide prestige invested in the Olympics). Turns out people are blaming/fearing the number 8 and, believe it or not, the Fuwas.

The number 8 is usually considered a lucky number because “eight” (八; bā) sounds like fā (发) from “get rich” (发财). People pay extra to have it in their phone number or on their license plate. The Olympics are scheduled to start on 2008-08-08 at 8:08:08pm (Take that!). However, people are saying that this year, 8 is a very unlucky number. The most popular reasons involve playing numerology with the dates of this year’s disasters:

• Spring Festival snowstorm disaster. Date: 1/25. 1+2+5=8.
• “Teabet” riots. Date: 3/14. 3+1+4=8.
• Shandong train collision. Date: 4/28. 4×2=8.
• Sichuan earthquake. Date: 5/12. 5+1+2=8.

And forget 666 as the Sign of the Beast. 888 is the sign of the (now evil) Fuwas! All but one of the Fuwas has associations with a disaster (talk about wolves in sheeps’ clothing!):

• Nīni (妮妮), the green one, has a kite on her head, representing the kite-flying tradition of Weifang in Shandong province (train collision).
• Yíngying (迎迎), the yellow one, is a Tibetan antelope (riots).
• Huānhuan (欢欢), the red one, is the Olympic flame, and that worldwide torch relay turned into a public relations disaster.
• Jīngjing (晶晶), the black one, is a panda. Panda’s come from Sichuan (earthquake).
• There’s still no dirt on Bèibei (贝贝), the blue one (she’s a fish), though horrible rain storms starting on March 26 (2+6=8!) caused bad flooding in various places.

Global Voices Online has translated a Chinese blogger’s take on all this, which also neatly summarizes the 8/Fuwa superstitions.

And in case you’re thinking this is all superstitious nonsense, we both came down with colds after sleeping ‘under the stars’ on the Great Wall. Turns out the Chinese lunar calendar for that weekend said, “To avoid catching a cold, avoid sleeping outside at night.” Ha! So there!

P.S. – And in case you were wondering what the 2008 Olympics are really about, that translated blog post from Global Voices Online is quite revealing:

…But we should not associate these disasters with the Olympic Games. After all, the Olympics are China’s glory, the glory of the Chinese people, and the honor we’ve earned…

P.P.S. - I bring this up not to make fun of people, but just to point out how a lot of Mainlanders are personally invested in the Olympics and their country; a lot of people here care a lot on some level about the country as a whole.

P.P.P.S. – Don’t forget to click the Chinese characters to see the pronunciation and definition!