Qingming Festival

Qingming Festival, bittersweet Chinese festival for honoring ancestors that is celebrated on the 15th day after the spring equinox, generally falling in early April. In the Chinese calendar, the year is divided into 24 solar terms of 15 days each; Qingming (Chinese: “Clear and Bright,” also often translated as “Pure Brightness”) is the fifth of these solar terms, and the holiday occurs on its first day. The main activity of the Qingming Festival is the cleaning or sweeping of ancestral tombs, and thus it is sometimes referred to as “Tomb Sweeping Day.” The festival is an ancient one, dating back at least 2,500 years in Chinese history. Beyond China it is celebrated by the Chinese diaspora and by people in and from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

Early history and development

In traditional Chinese culture, family members were buried outside settled areas, often on hillsides or mountainsides according to stipulations of feng shui—a practice of organizing sites and spaces for harmony. Visits to family tombs were consequently rare, and it was common for detritus to build up and for tombs to erode over time. In accordance with the Confucian precept of filial piety—devotion to one’s family and ancestors—it is the duty of descendants on this festival day to clean the tombs of their deceased ancestors.

The maintenance of tombs on this holiday is paired with worship of ancestors, a practice first noted during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bce), when texts recorded that nobility performed ancestral veneration rites on the day that is now known as the Qingming Festival. References to a wider societal practice of this kind appeared during the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce). In 732 ce emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty (618–907) proclaimed the Qingming Festival as an official holiday.

Over time the Qingming Festival merged with the Hanshi Festival, or “Cold Food Festival,” which fell on the 105th day after the winter solstice, and is typically celebrated a day before the Qingming Festival. The folkloric origin of the Cold Food Festival dates to the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 bce). According to the legend, a nobleman named Duke Wen sought to reward a subject, Jie Zitui, with a high post. Jie hid in a forest to avoid taking the post, so Wen lit the forest on fire. Instead of fleeing, Jie and his mother were killed in the fire. Wen was so remorseful over this incident that he banned the use of fire for several days around the yearly anniversary of the event. His subjects would have to subsist only on cold food for these days—hence, it became known as the “Cold Food Festival.” The most common cold food associated with the Qingming Festival is qingtuan, round, sticky, and sweet dumplings made with glutinous rice and often filled with red bean paste. Their exteriors are green due to the addition of mugwort. The Qingming Festival become the more prominent of the two festivals during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).

Poetic expressions

Across the history of the Qingming and Cold Food festivals, poets have written poems describing the emotions of the holidays combining the mourning over ancestors, feelings of loss, and the seasonal spring weather. Perhaps more meaningful than many factual sources about this holiday, these poems convey the emotional and climatological dimensions of the holiday, a festival of mourning and loss in productive tension with the season of life. One famous poem entitled “Qingming” is attributed to the poet Du Mu (803–52):

At the time of the Qingming Festival, a light rain drizzles on,
A traveller on the road desires to escape from it all.
He asks about a tavern where he might find a place to lodge,
A shepherd boy points to the distance at Apricot Blossom village.

A poem by Wu Wenying (1200–60) of the Song dynasty offers a similar mix of rainy springtime liveliness mixed with sorrow:

Hearing the wind and rain while mourning for the dead,
Sadly I draft an elegy on flowers.
We parted on the dark-green road before these bowers,
Where willow branches hang like thread,
Each inch revealing
Our tender feeling.
I drown my grief in wine in chilly spring;
Drowsy, I wake again when orioles sing.

Celebrated woman poet Li Qingzhao (1084–1155) wrote a poem, among the few of hers that survive, describing her emotions on Cold Food Day, intermixing nature and sentiment with a strong sense of transience and anticipation:

Genial, the spring sunlight, in Cold Food Festival weather.
Aloeswood burns in the jade censer, a wavering trail of fading smoke.
Returned from a dream, the pillow hides my inlaid flower hairpin.
The coastal swallows have not returned, people play the stalk guessing game;
the southern plum has faded, willows shed their cottony fluff.
A light rain at sunset moistens the garden swing.

Modern history and politicization

In March 1949, in the waning days of the Chinese Civil War and prior to the official establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party changed the name of the Qingming Festival to “Martyrs Memorial Day.” Under the party’s anti-religious, atheist regulations, ancestor worship and traditional religious practices were banned, as was tomb construction and physical burial of the deceased. The festival continued but in a politicized fashion that focused on honoring martyrs to the communist cause in order to inculcate in the population a nationalist consciousness beyond a familial identity and in opposition to belief in spirits. Contrary to the party’s intentions, during the Qingming Festival in 1976 thousands of people gathered in Beijing to honor the tomb of reform-minded leader Zhou Enlai as a protest against the more hard-line and repressive actions of the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution, which had aggressively cracked down on religious expression.

Following backlash to the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party’s perspectives on religion softened, and religious activities were again permitted to take place in public. State celebrations of the Qingming Festival continued to emphasize honoring martyrs to the communist cause, but popular practices involving tomb sweeping and ancestral worship were allowed to continue with less government oversight. In 2008 the Chinese government declared the Qingming Festival an official public holiday.

Ritual practices

The primary activity of the Qingming Festival is sweeping the accumulated debris off from ancestors’ tombs and performing any other tomb maintenance, such as removing weeds, renewing inscriptions, or painting, if needed. Family members then leave offerings for the deceased by burning incense, special paper money (spirit money), or paper reconstructions of valuable goods, such as cars or houses—practices that mirror the offerings to ancestors in another Chinese holiday, the Hungry Ghost Festival. Practitioners believe that burning these paper facsimiles transforms them into items and money that ancestors can use in the spirit world. Families also leave other offerings such as flowers and food. The food, like the burned items, is thought to be given ritually to the ancestors for their alimentary enjoyment. The specific foods offered can vary widely based on regional identity and ethnicity of the family. Many families place willow branches on the tombs or at the gates of graveyards since willow is traditionally believed to ward off evil spirits.

In addition to performing their duties to the ancestors, families customarily enjoy a “spring outing” (Chinese: taqing), usually a walk in nature and a picnic. Families will sometimes eat the food offerings that had been ritually offered to the ancestors. Other festive activities for this spring holiday include flying kites. In older times, people would release their kites by cutting the strings according to a belief that doing so would alleviate misfortune, setting their worries free with the kites. Historically, the festival also marked the start of the spring plowing season, although that tradition is no longer significant in urban areas. There is a long tradition of planting trees on this holiday that continues into the present with government support.

In modern China and in the Chinese diaspora, the intensive cleaning of graves has lessened in importance as graves have become smaller and most mainland Chinese citizens are cremated then buried in large graveyards with small tombs close together. Additionally, mass migrations from rural to urban areas in China over the past decades have meant that many people are very distant from any ancestral tombs and would need to travel to perform the ritual. Many members of the Chinese diaspora have a similar problem, which has given rise to Internet-based proxy systems or rituals live streamed on messaging apps such as WeChat. Another online development has been the creation of memorial websites wherein the deceased are provided with dedicated memorial hall pages, and descendants can log in from anywhere in the world to mourn and offer prayers. The Chinese government has advocated this tomb sweeping without physical sweeping—or burning of paper—in part because it accords with the government’s opposition to what it views as “superstition” but also because cyber-tomb sweeping offers an environmentally friendly way to mourn and honor the deceased.