Grand Canal barges have no fancy names, no mermaids planted on the bow, no corny sayings painted on the stern. Instead they have letters and numbers stamped on the side, like the brand on a cow. Such an unsentimental attitude might suggest unimportance, but barges plying the Grand Canal have knit China together for 14 centuries, carrying grain, soldiers, and ideas between the economic heartland in the south and the political capitals in the north.

[...]Canal people, known as chuanmin, re-create village life on their $100,000 barges. Like farmers at harvest time, the small crews—generally just one family—start at dawn and go till evening, when they tie up their boats next to each other. Old Zhu’s wife, Huang Xiling, now posted at the stern, had given birth to the family’s two sons on earlier barges. She cooked, cleaned, and made the boat’s little cabin a retreat from the water, wind, and sun. “The men say these boats are just a tool for making money, but our lives are spent on them,” she said. “You have so many memories.”

[...]Chuanmin rarely indulge themselves. They live by the hard-nosed calculations that determine whether a family gets rich or is ruined. This was driven home to me at the end of our first day. I was chatting with Zheng Chengfang, who came from the same village as Old Zhu. Our boats were tied up together, and I’d hopped over to visit with him. Wasn’t it a wonderful sight, I said to Zheng as we surveyed Old Zhu’s boat, freshly painted and gleaming in the sunset?

“No, no, no, you don’t understand us,” he blurted out. “It’s not a question of good. We chuanmin need the boats, or we can’t survive.”

Xinhua reported this week that the tomb of Emperor Yang of Sui, the ancient ruler credited with building the Grand Canal, may have been discovered not far from the banks of his legacy:

Chinese archaeologists said that a tomb unearthed in east Jiangsu Province might be the final resting place of an emperor known for his tyrannous reign about 1,500 years ago.

The 20-square-meter tomb in Yangzhou City might belong to Yang Guang, or Emperor Yang of Sui, the second and last monarch of the short-lived Sui Dynasty (581-618), according to the city’s cultural heritage bureau.

[...]A notorious tyrant in China’s history, Yang Guang made millions of workers build palaces and luxury leisure boats. His legacy includes the Grand Canal, which was later increased to connect Beijing and Hangzhou in the world’s longest artificial waterway.

The emperor was killed during a mutiny in 618 AD, which marked the end of the Sui Dynasty and may explain the relatively small scale of the extravagant emperor’s tomb, researchers said.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: archaeology, Chinese history, Grand Canal, history, ian johnson, Jiangsu, tombs
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A district chief in a southern Chinese city told me this story: Heavy rains had triggered a flood that swept away over a thousand graves, affecting more than 10,000 people. The Chinese have a deep-seated belief that the state of one’s ancestors’ graves determines one’s own fate. To accommodate urbanization, these thousand-odd graves, originally dispersed over a variety of locations, had been shifted and placed next to one another — a process that was itself contradictory, because according to tradition, graves are not to be moved, lest later generations suffer some calamity.

[...] Instead of mobilizing the police, however, the canny district chief summoned a dozen or so practitioners of feng shui. They calmed the protesters, assuring them that when the graves were swept away it signified a fortune in the making. As folk wisdom has it, water is wealth — and an encounter with water means you will get rich. The protesters didn’t trust the government, but they did trust the feng shui masters.

Here’s another story, told to me by a former county official in Hunan Province, in central China. Consignments of timber, concrete and reinforcing rods were piled on a vacant lot to prepare for the building of a government office block. Every evening, local residents would sneak over and help themselves to construction materials, planning to use them for their own projects. In their eyes, stealing property from the government didn’t count as theft, unlike, say, stealing from your neighbor. County officials proposed security measures: a perimeter wall topped by an electrified fence, and regular police patrols.

No need for any of that, the county leader told them. His solution: wooden signs posted on all four sides. “For temple construction,” the signs read. This did the trick: when the locals saw that the timber, steel and concrete were going to be used to build a Buddhist temple, not only did they stop their pilfering, but under cover of darkness they even returned the loot they had carted home. Theft of temple property, superstition told them, would incur terrible retribution.

See more on Yu Hua via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: local officials, superstition, tombs, traditional culture, yu hua
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At least 100,000 graves were rebuilt during the Spring Festival holiday, accounting for 7.7 percent of those leveled, official statistics from the Zhoukou Civil Affairs Bureau revealed.

The rebuilding of the graves comes as a counterattack after the controversial grave destruction campaign launched by the local government in February last year. In total, the campaign leveled over 2 million graves and reclaimed over 3 million hectares of farmland.

[…] The seesaw battle between the local government and the villagers continues today, highlighting the sensitivity of modern political actions when clashing with long-standing traditions.

[…] Tomb-Sweeping Day, a traditional holiday for honoring ancestors, will take place on April 4. Gong said he and other government officials are facing a lot of pressure as a new wave of grave rebuilding is expected around the day.

To prevent people from rebuilding graves, the local government plans to give out trees to villagers to commemorate Tomb-Sweeping Day. The idea is that villagers will plant the trees at the original spot of their ancestral graves as a marker and commemorate the dead ancestors under the tree

Global Times also recently profiled local official Zhao Keluo, who believes that he was removed from the Henan CPPCC as punishment for his vocal opposition to the tomb removals.

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Post tags: agriculture, death, farmland, Henan, land disputes, land grabs, tombs
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Even many critics of the grave-razing program […] acknowledge that China needs to reform funeral practices (and, inevitably, encourage cremation) to meet growing land demands. What primarily offends these commentators is the brusque method used to clear away the graves in Zhoukou. On Nov. 19, Zhong Yongheng, a native of Zhoukou and a journalist with People’s Daily, the official, self-declared Communist Party mouthpiece, used his account on the Twitter-like Ten Cent microblog, to post his family’s experience with Zhoukou’s program. His family, he notes, no longer lives in Zhoukou but has relocated north to Beijing:

“You should give us notice at least before you damage our ancestral tombs, don’t you think? My family members are all in Beijing and didn’t get any advance notice from anyone. Then we suddenly received news that our ancestral tombs were leveled by an excavator. My parents turned toward the south, wailing.”

[…] So far, there’s no evidence that Zhoukou’s officials — or its government — will benefit financially from the grave- clearing program. On the contrary, the Beijing News has reported that some low-level government officials, under pressure to provide good examples for the farmers, have personally dug up their ancestors’ bones.

In one tragic case of a low-level official making an example of his ancestors, however, the digging dislodged a large tombstone that crashed onto two of his living family members, killing both. Sympathy was a rare sight in the several hundred comments left beneath the Beijing News story, many of which suggested that supernatural forces were at play. Meanwhile, other comments took a more vindictive approach, with one of the most repeated comments qualifying as the most direct: “Deserved it.”

At Global Times, Yu Jincui wrote that the “aggressive and showy tomb excavation campaign stinks to high heaven“, explained the depth of the taboo surrounding burial sites, and condemned the authorities’ heavy-handed attempt to overrule locals’ concerns.

In Chinese tradition, the removal of ancestral graves is the biggest insult one can endure, and those who excavate tombs are said to be subject to the most vicious curse.

[…] Considering the cultural and historical background of tombs and the importance they have for people, villagers’ resistance to their removal is not only understandable, but also predictable. In order for this plan to work, the government needs to both cooperate with and respect local residents.

[…] Those who excavate others’ tombs are traditionally considered to be cursed. The reputation of some historical figures is forever tainted by their merciless excavation of others’ tombs, such as Sun Dianying, a warlord in the 1920s who desecrated and looted the Eastern Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In light of strong public opposition, tomb removal in many cities has been halted, including in Zhoukou.

I am afraid the efforts of these local officials are doomed to go down in history as a bad example in the tale of China’s funeral reform. China’s local governments should understand that using force to promote reform is no longer effective today. Leaders in Henan and other provinces should take time to reflect on this.

Caixin’s Wang Yong acknowledged the economic and political pressures on local officials and the need for reform of burial practices. But, he argued, the “tomb-flattening campaign” epitomised the “typical” Chinese approach of using a huge and inflexible bureaucracy to shunt economic development forward at all costs.

First, there are usually serious legal complications. In the case of forced tomb removal, article 20 of the Mortuary Service Administration Act says that improperly buried remains can be forcibly removed. But according to the Administration Enforcement Law that came to effect last January, the act has no authority to enforce the provision. If enforcement is to be implemented, an administrative decision must be made by the civil affairs officials and executed by a court.

Had the Henan authorities followed this procedure, even if they had enforced their “tomb-flattening policy” for 10 years, they wouldn’t have achieved much. Sadly, the political movement is often in total contradiction with the rule of law in China.

Second, value and cost calculations follow the internal logic of bureaucracy. Career promotion is the incentive and “political achievements” are the yardstick. Officials follow this without thinking of the interests of the community as a whole.

This is why even when scholars such as Yao Zhongqiu, a research fellow at Cathay Institute for Public Affairs, call for the protection of traditional Chinese culture and people’s freedom to worship, tradition still bears no weight in the face of the pressure placed on officials.

It is difficult to calculate the hidden social cost of people’s mental suffering. It does not affect officials’ “political achievements,” therefore it does not enter into their consideration.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: death, economic development, forced evictions, funerals, Henan, land reclamation, local corruption, local officials, tombs
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Ever since Deng Xiaoping signaled in 1978 that it was fine to get rich, much of China has seemed hell-bent on that goal. But some local governments would like those who succeed not to lord it over others, at least when it comes to paying final respects.

As of last month, in the cemeteries of this hilly megalopolis in south central China, modest burial sites are in. Fancy tombs are out. And in some places, so are fancy funerals.

Plots for ashes are limited to 1.5 square meters, about 4 feet by 4 feet. Tombstones are supposed to be no higher than 100 centimeters, or 39 inches, although it is not clear that limit will be enforced. Sellers of oversize plots have been warned of severe fines, as much as 300 times the plot’s price.

“Ordinary people who walk by and see these lavish tombs might not be able to keep their emotions in balance,” said Zheng Wenzhong, as he visited the relatively modest resting place of a relative at The Temple of the Lighted Lamp cemetery. That is apparently exactly what many officials fear. After a quarter of a century in which the gap between rich and poor has steadily widened, the wretched excesses of the affluent are increasingly a Chinese government concern.

China’s income inequality, as measured by a standard called the Gini coefficient, is now on a par with some Latin American and African countries, according to the World Bank. Justin Yifu Lin, the bank’s chief economist, last year identified the growing disparity as one of China’s biggest economic problems.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: funerals, tombs
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Three ancient tombs have been unearthed in Chongqing, one of which contained a female mummy estimated to be 800 years old. From Caijing:

Construction workers in southwest China’s Chong Qing Municipality discovered three ancient tombs with one housing a 30 to 40 cm-long female mummy, covered with mud, local authority said.

The mummy was found in a oblong rectangular box at the tomb on March 1 in Tongshanqiao, a village in Shangping District’s Xi Yong Town in Chong Qing.

Along with the mummy discovered was a hair pin made from jade. It was suspected that the tombs were built some 800 years ago.

Images of flowers, waitresses and mythical creatures were carved on the walls of the tombs.

© victoriawu for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: excavation, tombs
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Nine 1,700-year-old brick tombs have been discovered in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which, experts say, provide valuable clues for the research of exchanges between the central Chinese government at that time and remote Western Regions.

It is the first time ancient tombs with typical characteristics of China’s main Han nationality have been found in the Uygur ethnic region, said Yu Zhiyong, deputy head of the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute….[Full Text]

[Image from Xinhua]

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Post tags: archaeology, history, tombs, Xinjiang
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Ancient imperial tombs were unearthed during construction at a competition site for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, prompting work to be suspended.

The tombs, found in mid-April, are believed to date more than 500 years to the Ming dynasty and may be those of eunuchs serving at the imperial court, the Beijing Morning Post said Monday.

Beijing has been the site of various Chinese governments for more than 1,000 years, and almost every major building project unearths grave sites or relics. Most are removed or destroyed before experts can examine them.

© Michael Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Beijing Olympics, tombs
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