Tombs

We went to Su Zhou today, to visit the tombs of where my parents' parents and grandparents are buried.

Su Zhou is a town about an hour outside of Shanghai and for as long as i can remember, it was always a place where the tombs are. Growing up, we used to visit the tombs once a year. There would be at least 10, 12 of us going each time. My mom would make tons of sandwiches and tea-cured hardboiled eggs, with flasks of tea, and we'd go by long distance busses. Quite a trip, it used to be. Now, with all the highways and nice roads, it takes all of an hour to get there. We left at 9, and were back in Shanghai by 11.30!


This is an weird place. The entire hill is covered by tombs from all different families, like a graveyard. Only that a few years ago, the gov't suddenly decided that it's unattractive to have such a hill. And proposed to pay each family about 1% of the cost for each family to set up their tombs there, and move the gravesite elsewhere. This was met by furious families of course, and in the end, the gov't still couldn't come up with the money to compensate the familes and decided just to COVER the hill with trees. Enough trees that no one can see the tombstones from a distance.


In Chinese traditions, people bring silver/lead powder covered paper that's made into the shapes of ancient chinese money, yuan bao, to burn at the graveside, signifying giving money to the dead to use in purgatory, I suppose. And because of the mass tree planting, it would be dangerous for this ritual burning to take place on the hill, so the solution? See the picture above. If you can read Chinese, you'd know that it means "Bank for the Dead" (well more or less). So the grave keepers created this "central" location where people get to do the burning of paper money, and it supposedly stores it in the banks for the dead. Quite ingenius of a solution, no?


This is quite a tomb for my grandfather, whose headstone is the big one standing behind the boys. There are 4 smaller ones lying on the ground in front of him, that belongs to his 4 wives. Yes, he had 4 wives at the same time. It was till legal back then. My grandmother was the 4th and youngest wife. She was only 16 when she married him.

We didn't bother with the burning of paper money though, and left flowers instead.