Called Qing Ming Jia, or Clear Brightness House (to make your ancestral and current house beautiful and clearly loved and respected with bright - happy - thoughts and actions...) is the annual homage to ancestors. We often will go back to our family grave sights, plant flowers, clear away weeds, wipe down the tombstone...and this is very much the same. However, this one has a tinge of the crazy and the folk-religion taste that makes any regular event extravagant.
The timing is meant to both respect your ancestors and also welcome spring and mark the beginning of the new planting season. Two birds, one stone, as it were. They believe that the dead ancestors, in their dissociated molecular state, take care of the living and in respect to them (and to make sure that they keep taking care of the living...) they clean, wipe, sweep and leave offerings of food, incense (burning incense is a faster way to have your message meet the gods, they say) and the ubiquitous 'spirit money'. Tombs cleaned, food left on it, incense lit and spirit money burned at the foot of the grave, people meet with extended family and eat and reconnect. It is a family reunion afterwards, and people travel from all over the island to return to their traditional family grounds to take part. Its a nice mix of historical homage, contemporary reality (people live very far away and rarely get to go home because Taiwan has approximately no holidays other than a handful ... some of which are holidays, but you dot get time off work) and the wickedly crazy-ass religion and spirituality.
Some highlights:
Food - you have to leave food at the foot of the grave, and it has to be bland. Why? Well...don't you know...ghosts walk around the graveyards and they are ever so hungry. You need to leave food that will not entice them to your ancestors grave, yet food that your ancestors will also like in their afterlife. A fine line...
The Grave - needs to be oriented to maximize the ... and I'm serious...the cosmic flow of energy. Beyond being utter bullshit, this is a fine moment to ask what cosmic energy is, how it is measured and just why orientation parallel to it is better than perpendicular. I would love a physicist to take this one on. Or anybody with a skeptical bone in their body...
Pray - Everybody in Taiwan (and country with Chinese people....) prays for their specific ancestors to be happy, for themselves to become rich and be happy at the same time. God must have a really...and I mean really...good secretary to keep track. He must hate this day...so noisy, so busy...and finally being asked to do something. Or...pulling out my razor...lets see ... gillette...no....straight edge...close, but no.....ah, here it is...Occam's Razor. It would tell me something totally different. Probably that god is imaginary, and that they whole shebang is a typical tyrannical observance of pseudo-reality. I wonder if the pray-lines have a bandwidth limit....I would hate for an overload and some of those ever so important prayers to be lost in cyberspace...or cosmicspace...or godspace...whatever they call it.
Despite being a typical folk-religion based exercise in futility, it is also a perfect time for families to get back together and to do things that will put their minds at rest...just as we do...and it is a holiday that lets people have a long needed break from their working lives.
A typical grave; elaborate and mostly above ground, as compared to the westersn "6 feet under" version.
A broom. On Tomb Sweeping Day, I think it is obvious what this tool is used for.
