Qingming Festival 2023

Qingming Festival (清明节) is one of the most important traditional festivals in China.The QingMing Festival, literally meaning Pure Brightness Festival, takes place on the fifteenth day after the spring equinox. As a holiday devoted to remembering and honoring the deceased, people sweep and decorate gravesites, burn incense and paper money, and make food offerings. Observed for more than 2,500 years, the festival traditions derive primarily from Confucianism, which emphasizes respect and filial piety to the deceased.

This tradition has been legislated by the Emperors who built majestic imperial tombstones for every dynasty. For thousands of years, the Chinese imperials, nobility, peasantry, and merchants alike have gathered together to remember the lives of the departed, to visit their tombstones to perform Confucian filial piety by tomb sweeping, unds, graveyards or in modern urban cities, the city columbaria, to perform ground skeeping and maintenance and to commit to pray for their ancestors in the uniquely Chinese concept of the afterlife and to offer remembrances of their ancestors to living blood relatives, their kith and kin.

Qingming Festival is a time of many different activities, among which the main ones are tomb sweeping, taking a spring outing, and flying kites. Some other lost customs like wearing willow branches on the head and riding on swings have added infinite joy in past days. It is a combination of sadness and happiness.

Interestingly, this festival’s closely linked to farming as well. As temperatures rise and rainfall increases, Qingming is a sign for farmers to plant in spring.