Cemetery

Next week in China is Qing Ming Jie, or the Tomb Sweeping Festival. This is an annual festival where people will visit the tombs of their ancestors, clean them, pray to their acestors, burn incense and maybe paper money or even paper cars, houses or other items in the hope that the smoke will carry the items to their ancestors in the spirit world.
Nanchang has a number of cemeteries. This one is near XiaLuo and is vast. There must be hundreds of thousands of headstones. Land is a valuable resource in China so most people are cremated and a headstone erected in their memory. There are a few larger tombs here but it is only really in the countryside that you can see the traditional tombs.
Next week this cemetery will be crowded with the living as people visit and pay respects to their ancestors. In fact it is so busy that the road is closed to ordinary traffic and special buses are laid on for people to go there.
It is really difficult to show just how big this place is without going inside but a foreigner walking around taking pictures seemed somewhat disrespectful as there were some people already cleaning their ancestor's tombs. This section of the cemetery was by the roadside and without visitors, but even in just this small section you can see how many headstones there are and this is maybe only 2 or 3% of the total area.
(by Andy Meek)