Hakka guazhi

Hakkas often visit graves in spring and autumn, and the Spring Festival is usually from beginning of spring to Lantern Festival. Similarly, Qingming is also an important sacrificial festival for Hakkas.

Hakkas have different names for sweeping graves, such as hanging paper, digging the ground and beating the grave. Among them, the saying of "hanging paper" is more popular and popular, and the way of hanging paper is the most distinctive, which represents the custom of Hakka grave sweeping to some extent. Most of the tombs built by Hakkas for their ancestors are the top graves, commonly known as "land". When hanging paper, first trim the graveyard, uproot weeds, clean the tombstone, and then use stones to hold down the small yellow papyrus (commonly known as feet) around the half-moon tomb and demarcate it. One * * * is twelve pieces, commonly known as the Twelve Gods, which need more respect in the year with leap month, which represents the annual festival. Then drop the cock's blood on a pile of yellow papyrus, put it on the head of the tomb, press it with stones, and form a hanging shape, so it is called "hanging paper".

It is said that at the time of sacrifice, the tomb door has been opened, and ancestors communicated with worshippers through the cemetery, dividing the boundaries with rooster blood and respect paper to avoid the invasion of foreign ghosts. In Hakka folklore, the blood of the rooster is used to exorcise ghosts and eliminate evil spirits, and wizards, witches and charlatans even use the blood of the rooster to draw symbols to exorcise ghosts. With the changes of the times and the simplification of customs, the way of chicken blood dripping paper is rare now. Most of them use red paper instead of chicken blood, and large pieces of gold and silver paper instead of yellow toilet paper as hanging paper for the tomb head. When offering sacrifices, tea and toast should be offered in front of the tombstone, and sacrifices such as three animals, cakes, candy and paper money should be put into Tangdi Lake. Worshipers bow down with incense (commonly known as singing), then burn incense and paper money and set off firecrackers when they leave. The longer they ring, the more developed their descendants will be and the greater their future will be.

During the festival, elders will tell their ancestors' spirit of hard struggle and pioneering spirit, tell their deeds of helping each other with their neighbors, and teach their younger generations to remember their kindness. At the same time, let the younger generation know their generation and origin from the tombstone lettering, encourage the younger generation to make progress and honor their ancestors.

The above is the way of hanging paper in the second burial tomb, but there are different ways of offering sacrifices to the ancestors' tombs or the buried golden mounds (or "gold vendors"), so it is necessary to offer family sacrifices in the form of "please". When "please", yellow papyrus paper is also hung on graves or golden mounds. Worshippers must read "please" and put incense on it, and then bring one of the burning incense back to the shrine for family sacrifice.

Hakka dialect "paper" is homophonic with "ancestor", and hanging paper means "hanging ancestor", and the whiteness of the words directly entrusts the grief for ancestors. After the sacrifice, although people left the scene, the tomb paper was still hanging, the wind was blowing, the paper was floating, and hanging paper showed filial piety.