Yesterday was Qing Ming, China's major ancestor-worship festival - when families are supposed to return to their ancestral homes and do a little spring-cleaning of the graves of their deceased forebears.
Also, they offer 'grave gifts' to the dead - usually fake money to be burned, but these days increasingly often pictures or paper effigies of luxury consumer goods like cars and golf clubs and..... well, just about anything you care to name (I seem to remember there was a story a few years back about one graveyard attempting to ban the offering of lewd items like, what was it, KTV hostesses or something? Sorry, I haven't got time to dig that one out at the moment. Maybe later.). And if you haven't got time to visit the family graves, you burn even more stuff to try to appease the dear departed, to bribe them into overlooking your impious laziness.
So, this morning we woke to find Beijing under a fine brown fug. It's not very cloudy. There's not much mist or humidity. The traffic is quite light, and the factories are probably mostly closed down (since the government has this year decided for the first time to grant a day of national holiday to the festival, thereby giving us a 3-day weekend). So, it's not our regular Beijing smog. No, it's just SMOKE from all these ancestor-gifts. And it's been getting steadily worse all day: visibility is now down to a few hundred yards.
It's incredible to think that this antique superstition is still honoured on such a scale that it can visit days of enviromental catastrophe on the country. Incredible, but sadly true.
1 comment:
and i was just starting to feel somewhat normal about the whole breathing thing. sigh. now it's Monday morning and still smokey.
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