What day is Qingming Day exactly?

Is Qingming Festival a traditional Chinese festival

Chingming Festival is a traditional Chinese festival. Qingming Festival is not only a traditional festival in China, but also one of the four traditional Chinese festivals. The Qingming Festival has a long history, which can be traced back to the ancestor beliefs and spring festival rituals in the ancient times.

What day is the Qingming Festival

The Qingming Festival is fixed from April 4 to 6 on the Gregorian calendar, but not on the lunar calendar. The Qingming Festival integrates natural festivals and humanistic customs into one, which is the unity of heaven, earth and man, fully reflecting the idea that the ancestors of the Chinese nation pursued the harmony and unity of heaven, earth and man, and paid attention to conforming to heaven and earth and following the laws of nature.

Customs of the Qingming Festival

Custom 1: Sweeping tombs and paying homage to ancestors

Sweeping tombs and paying homage to ancestors is the most important activity of the Qingming Festival. Once upon a time, during the Qingming Festival, people, regardless of their rank and file, would always sweep the graves of their deceased ancestors. Tomb-sweeping was not limited to the day of Ching Ming, but varied from place to place. When sweeping the graves, the first thing to do is to cut all the weeds on the mound, repair the tomb around, and then add some new soil on the mound to protect, and then burn paper money, incense and candles, offer wine, meat and rice, firecrackers, and finally kneel to the ancestors.

Customs two: spring trip

"The river ice is gone, the bank grass green, three three five five to go trekking." Qingming season is also a time of vigor, people say goodbye to the dormant household life, welcome the bright sunshine of spring, breathing the breath of green grass, feet stepping on the soft ground, wandering in the beautiful flowers and reds, warblers and swallows dance on the field, then the mood of the mood is how light and happy!

Talking about trekking, we can go all the way back to Confucius. According to the Analects of Confucius, he was once discussing his life's ambitions with his disciples, and when the other disciples generously stated their grandiose blueprints for ruling the country, Confucius didn't say a word. It was Zeng Ci's turn to say, "In the twilight of spring, wearing freshly made spring clothes, with five or six friends and six or seven children, go to the Yishui River to take a bath and dance with the wind, and after the bath, humming a folk tune, set out on the way home." Hearing this, Confucius smiled, nodded and said, "I agree with your ideal." The conversation between Confucius and Zeng Ci shows that as far back as the Spring and Autumn Period, people had the activity of wild bathing and trekking in the late spring.

Custom 3: Kite Flying

In ancient times in China, kite flying was not only an amusement activity, but also an act of witchcraft, and it was believed that flying kites could let go of one's bad luck. So when many people flew kites on Qingming Festival, they wrote all the illnesses and diseases they knew on the kites, and when the kites were flying high, they cut the kite strings and let the kites drift away with the wind, symbolizing that they let their bad luck and illnesses go away with the kites. Therefore, the kites let go by others cannot be picked up, otherwise they will be stained with bad luck. This custom is also called "flying broken harriers" in Chinese folklore. The history of kites is very long. It is said that the first kite in the world was made of wood by Lu Ban, a famous craftsman in the Spring and Autumn Period, and there were also bamboo kites at that time. In the Han Dynasty, paper kites, called "paper kites", appeared. After Tang Dynasty, kites became popular as a kind of children's toys. Gao Ding, a poet of the Qing Dynasty, once depicted the scene of kite flying: "The grass grows and the warblers fly in February, and the willows on the embankment are drunk with spring smoke. Children return early from school, busy taking advantage of the east wind to fly paper kites." People added a bamboo flute to the paper kite, and when the paper kite flew up to the sky and was blown by the wind, it made a "woo-woo" sound, like the sound of a kite playing, so people renamed the paper kite as "kite". The most famous kite festival in contemporary China is the "International Kite Festival" in Weifang, Shandong Province, which has been held every year on the Qingming Festival since 1984, and Weifang is also known as the "Kite Capital of the World".

Custom 4: Eating Eggs

The origin of eating eggs on the Qingming Festival is the custom of banning fire in some areas during the pre-Qin era, and the hard-boiled eggs are the best food reserve to get through this period.

The festival eggs, roughly divided into two kinds, one is "painting eggs", the other is "carving eggs". The former can be eaten, and it is believed that if you eat this kind of egg, you will not have a headache for a year; the latter is only for fun.

Exploring the symbolic meaning of eating eggs at the Qingming Festival, which also implies that people's reverence for life, fertility and faith.

The egg is a symbol of fertility and life in ancient Chinese culture. Legend has it that Pangu, the creator of the heavens and the earth, was conceived in an egg, and that "heaven and earth are as chaotic as a chicken, and Pangu was born in it". The founder of the Shang Dynasty, Chee, was born when he saw a bird fall from its egg, and Jane Dee took it and swallowed it, thus giving birth to a child. Folk custom, women give birth to a child, to the neighbors to report the good news, sent also eggs.

Ching Ming is the ancestor of the day of the tomb, there is a folk saying, the tomb will be white boiled eggs on the tombstone broken, egg shells thrown on the grave, symbolizing the "shell", foreshadowing the renewal of life, I hope that the children and grandchildren will be able to make a name for themselves.