Ancestor tablet veneration is a central practice of Chinese religion and of the wider East Asian traditions shaped by Confucianism, in which the deceased forebears of a family are honoured through inscribed wooden tablets that serve as the resting place of their spirits. Each tablet bears the name and titles of an ancestor and is understood to house their presence, so that the family may continue to serve them after death much as they served their elders in life. The tablets are kept on a domestic altar or in a lineage's ancestral hall, and before them the family makes regular offerings of incense, food, wine and other necessities, reports important events, and bows in reverence, maintaining across the boundary of death the bond of care and obligation between the generations.
The practice rests on the Confucian virtue of xiao, filial piety, extended beyond the grave: the duty of children to honour and support their parents does not end with death but continues in the reverent service of their spirits, and the neglect of the ancestors is a grave failing. It expresses a conception of the family as a community spanning the living and the dead, in which the well-being of each depends on the other, the ancestors watching over and blessing their descendants, the descendants sustaining the ancestors through remembrance and offering. Ancestral veneration of this kind proved a point of sharp conflict when Christianity entered China, in the long-running dispute over whether the rites were idolatry or civil honour, a controversy that shaped the history of the Chinese church for centuries.