The ancestor tablet is a small upright wooden board inscribed with the name, titles and dates of a deceased person, and it serves as the material seat in which the spirit of that ancestor is present to receive the devotion of the living.
The seat of the spirit
Inscribed with the name and dates of the dead, the tablet is understood as the place where the spirit of the ancestor resides and can be honoured, and it is kept on the domestic altar or in the ancestral hall and set before offerings of food, incense and prayer at the festivals and the anniversaries of death. The dead are thereby fed and remembered and their continued place in the family affirmed, so the tablet is the focus of the ancestral devotion that is central to Chinese religion, the point at which the living and the dead of a lineage meet.
Making and keeping
The setting-up of a tablet is itself a rite, and in one widespread practice the final stroke of the character for the deceased is added by an honoured person to bring the spirit into the tablet, so that the object is consecrated to its purpose rather than merely written. The tablets of the ancestors are arranged by generation, in the home for the recent dead and in the ancestral hall for the collective forebears of the lineage, so that the rows of tablets make the descent from the founding ancestor to the living visible. The tablet is thus the small and central object of ancestor worship, the wooden seat in which the forebear remains present to the family that honours it.