Qingming Festival Ⅱ: the Chinese Tomb Sweeping Day

Qingming festival, also known as the Tomb Sweeping Day or ancestor day, which falls annually on April 5, is a day when Chinese around the world remember their dearly departed and take time off to clean up the tombs and place flowers and offerings. Chinese flock to cemeteries during Qingming Festival and honour their dead by offering prayers, food, tea, wine as well as paper replicas of bungalows, flashy cars, technological gadgets and Louis Vuitton bags, for their dead to enjoy in the afterlife.

An elderly couple touches the names of their relatives after sticking chrysanthemums onto the name list of victims who were killed during the Nanjing Massacre, at the Nanjing Massacre Museum in China. – Photo by Reuters

An elderly man repaints the characters at a tomb of his deceased relative. – Photo by AP

A man repaints the characters on a tomb of his relative at a cemetery. – Photo by AP

Flowers, biscuits, fake moneys and cigarettes are placed on the tomb plates at a cemetery in Beijing. – Photo by AP

A vendor folds paper money in the shape of lotus, used as offerings to ancestors, in front of her stall at a public cemetery in Taiwan. – Photo by Reuters