Tombsweeping and the empty tomb

A tale of two festivals

Tulip time in Canal Town.

It’s Eastertime. Spring flowers are out in force, and the weather has turned warm, but not yet too warm. Perfect for an Easter Sunday picnic in the park after church — a low-key way to enjoy friendship and food, even for those who don’t especially mark the holiday. I’m making miniature pork pies (that quintessential British picnic food) and Earl Grey cupcakes topped with Cadbury’s Mini Eggs, part of the parcel of Easter goodies sent from home.

Tombsweeping Festival also falls around this time of year. Both Easter and Tombsweeping are determined by a lunar calendar, so their order in time varies each year. The year before last, Canal Town went into a two-week Covid lockdown at Tombsweeping and on Easter Sunday, the lifting of lockdown was announced. This year, Tombsweeping is a few days later than Easter. It’s a one-day public holiday, but in the somewhat baroque system that’s used to give people a few more days off together, we’re off Thursday to Saturday, then have to work the following Sunday to make up for the Friday.

Tombsweeping (or Qingming, 清明节) is when Chinese families traditionally clean up the tombs of their ancestors and make offerings to ease their life in the underworld. It’s an important sign of respect even if people don’t actually believe in the spirit world, like my friend Lihua*.

A few years ago, when I was living in Beijing, Lihua invited me to join her and her family on a Tombsweeping trip to her family home in Fujian Province, down south. She wanted to take her young son Bingbing* to experience and understand this aspect of his culture. She also wanted to pay her respects to her father and grandfather, as she had not been able to return for several years.

We travelled south on an overnight train, a slow “green-skin” sleeper. There were five of us: Lihua, her husband Zhen*, her mother, and Bingbing, who was then around seven years old and an irrepressible livewire. I spent much of the journey playing Scrabble with him, in English but using a French set that Lihua had picked up second-hand somewhere, so there were too many vowels. He did remarkably well nonetheless. The weather got warmer and the landscape greener and more lush as we went south, until we disembarked in the coastal city of Fuzhou.

Lihua had grown up in a village outside Fuzhou, but since then it had been swallowed by the city. We walked the chasms between concrete cliffs, while she pointed out where the fields used to be where she picked jasmine flowers to sell for tea, and where the creek used to be where she and cousins caught frogs on summer evenings.

The next day, we went to “sweep” her grandfather’s tomb. He had been buried on a hillside a little way outside town. The city had not quite reached this far yet, and we walked along a dusty road under a sun that was hotter than any of us had anticipated. We stopped to buy water in a roadside convenience shop, but not enough. Everyone was carrying something. Bingbing insisted on taking the plastic bag with the lighter, incense sticks and candles, itching to get his fingers on flame.

Bingbing* charges ahead in the search for his great-grandfather’s grave.

The hillside where Lihua’s grandfather was buried was thick with bamboo and pimpled with grave mounds. It had been a popular burial site for the village before government regulations decreed that bodies should be cremated rather than buried, as the population grew and land was needed for the living. On that Tombsweeping day, there were small knots of people scattered all over this hillside, clearing unwanted vegetation from the graves and burning incense and paper money.

The first problem was finding the grandfather’s grave. Lihua had not been there for some years, and struggled to remember exactly where it was. It was her father’s father, so her mother was also uncertain. We wandered up and down, sometimes pushing through scratchy thickets of scrub or stands of tough bamboo. (Before experiencing bamboo in southern China, I’d not realised how fast and how tall it grows, as tall as full-grown trees.) Everyone got hot and thirsty, and by the time we eventually pushed into a green forehead of clearer ground between thickets of trees and bamboo and Lihua declared us in the right place, almost all the water was gone.

The water was almost gone, but the bulk of the work was still ahead. At least in that part of China, “sweeping” the tomb is a misnomer. Lihua’s mother pulled out a couple of machetes and a couple of hoes. Our first task was clearing all the bamboo that had grown in the grave area. The blades were less sharp than they might have been. Hacking down just one thick stem of bamboo then trying to dig out the roots was a significant effort. My arms were soon jarring with every blow.

Traditional graves in China vary from region to region, but in that part of Fujian, they are shaped with a central mound, like a gently pyramidal head, with two “arms” extending round in front. It was important to clear all of the “head” and the “arms”, all the way up to the “hands”, an area of perhaps twenty square metres. It was clearly going to take a couple of hours of work. Lihua and her mother attacked it energetically, and young Bingbing went at it with gusto if not the greatest efficacy. Zhen was less enthusiastic. It wasn’t long before he started complaining.

“This is good enough!” he would say at intervals, to which Lihua would respond that they had to clear the whole area. After a while he started suggesting that they leave it for this year, then hire someone to come and encase the tomb in concrete, as some others on the hill had done, to make it easier in future. This got short shrift from his wife, who felt he was disrespecting her family.

The argument got worse when the tomb was finally cleared and they were ready to present the incense and other offerings. When Zhen picked up the plastic bag with the incense sticks, they discovered that the bottom had got snagged on something during our scramble through the thickets, and the lighter had fallen out the hole that had got torn in it. Accusations flew. Zhen disappeared down the hill.

He re-appeared a little while later, carefully carrying a lit candle.

“Where did you get that?”

“Off someone else’s tomb.”

“How could you do that?!?”

“The family were gone! It’s not like they’re going to notice anyway!”

They let the argument go and used the purloined candle to light the incense for her grandfather and to burn the stash of paper money they had brought, adding to the drifts of smoke that filled the air by that point in the afternoon. Everyone was glad to head back down the hill and go home. Paying respects at Lihua’s father’s resting place later on was much easier; he had been cremated, and his ashes were in a public memorial hall in the town.

I remember that trip every year at Tombsweeping. In one regard it stands out because it’s not the kind of festival that’s easily accessible to an outsider. But it has a particular poignancy now, because Zhen is no longer with us. He died of liver cancer two years later.

Bingbing has grown up without his father for most of his young life. When he was two years old, Zhen was arrested (in a highly irregular way), charged with embezzlement, and spent four years in prison. That year we went to Fujian for Tombsweeping, he had not long been released. Lihua remains certain of his innocence. The outcome of the trial, she said, depended on who could offer the biggest bribe. I grieve for what Lihua and Bingbing have been robbed of, first by injustice and then by death.

That’s why for me and many others, the empty tomb of Easter is such a sign of hope. Of injustice overturned, corruption conquered, death defeated. To all those who celebrate: Happy Easter! He is risen!

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