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Pilgrims ready for festival
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2004-12-14 10:22
An estimated 2.3 million local people will set up new tombs or make a
pilgrimage to ancestors' graves during this year's Dongzhi, or the Winter
Solstice Festival, the funeral management division of the Shanghai Civil Affairs
Bureau said yesterday.
Officials said 26,000 new tombs will be set up and
114,000 vehicles will be used to take people to the graveyards.
Dongzhi
Festival, which falls on December 21, will witness the largest number of people
traveling to cemeteries, officials said. A lot of of people also expected to
visit gravesites on the two weekends before and after the
festival.
Dongzhi Festival is the last festival on the Chinese calendar
each year. Usually falling on December 21 or 22 to coincide with the winter
solstice, it is considered the Chinese Thanksgiving Day.
Families worship
their ancestors during the daytime and gather together at night to enjoy a
dinner to celebrate the past year. Glutinous rice dumplings known as tangyuan
are eaten to signify unity and harmony within the family.
Different from
the Qingming Festival, which is a time both for setting up new tombs and
sweeping old tombs, Dongzhi is considered the ideal time for burying
ashes.
This is because the festival is the day with the longest night of
the year, and yin - which symbolizes the feminine and passive cosmic principle
in ancient Chinese dualistic philosophy - is at its strongest.
The large
number of people traveling to suburban gravesites caused many traffic accidents,
leading to a large number of injuries and deaths.
To avoid accidents, the
Shanghai Fushouyuan Cemetery said it will offer passengers taking the cemetery's
buses a 50 percent discount if they come on afternoon of December 21 instead of
that morning, and free transport if they come during ordinary days. The price of
a return bus ticket is 20 yuan (US$2.41).
"Though the measure costs us
some 20,000 yuan to 30,000 yuan more, it may help reduce the heavy traffic
burden," said Wang Jisheng, manager of Fushouyuan.
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