The custom of funeral

Every place is different. The Han nationality is roughly:

The old tradition of Han funeral is to pay attention to heavy burial, which is mixed with many superstitious customs. When a person dies, he should take a shower first and then go to his funeral. The ceremony of "mourning" is divided into small mourning and big mourning. The small urn is to wrap the body in a coat, and the big urn is to put the body in a coffin. The coffin should be made as well as possible. Some wealthy families make coffins out of precious wood (such as nanmu) and draw colorful pictures. The funeral should be grand, and there should be several days or even ten days of mourning and memorial activities, and monks and Taoist priests should be invited to recite scriptures, in order to let the souls of the deceased ascend to heaven as soon as possible.

During the funeral, the relatives of the deceased should wear mourning clothes and wake in the mourning hall. In the ancient etiquette system of China, filial piety was divided into five grades according to the kinship with the deceased. There is also a word "five clothes" in modern Chinese to express the distance of blood relationship. Filial piety is made of white cloth, which is quite different from the custom of westerners wearing white clothes to make dresses. In the Qing Dynasty, an Englishman came to China for the first time. When he met the funeral procession, everyone was dressed in white, but his expression was painful, sad and strange. In ancient times, people sang elegies at funerals, and Tao Yuanming, a great poet in Jin Dynasty, wrote three elegies for himself before his death. The elegy of later generations evolved from the elegy of ancient times.

The scale of the funeral ceremony is closely related to the status of the deceased. In feudal society, there were strict regulations on funeral ceremonies for people with different identities and status. Princes, nobles and rich people often show off their power with large-scale funerals. In A Dream of Red Mansions, Qin Keqing died in Ningguo Mansion with a coffin worth several thousand taels of silver. Two or three hundred monks chanted, and the procession at the funeral was "mighty and unstoppable". The poor don't even have enough food and clothing, so naturally there is no "reburial". Sometimes you can only wrap the body with a mat and bury it hastily.

After the death of the elder, children and grandchildren should stay at home for 27 months, during which time they should stop socializing and entertaining. Officials also have to leave their jobs and go home to be filial, which is called "keeping the system."