A Little Bling for Your Afterlife

The annual Chinese “tomb sweeping” celebration has been noted a few times here; since 2008, it’s had a resurgence since the government reinstated it as an official holiday. The theory is, folks bring valuable items (such as jewelry) to ancestors’ gravesites and bury them with the body, which upgrades the relative’s afterlife. Now, though, practitioners seem convinced paper images of items are sufficient (and, of course, less expensive). Many just leave signed (and generous!) checks for the dead, according to an April New York Times item; others bury representations of “mistresses” to go with presumably frisky corpses.