In much of northern Vietnam the process traditionally included a second burial. Some years after the first interment, at a time settled by the family and often by divination, the grave is opened, the bones are taken out, washed, and placed in a smaller ossuary tomb which is the permanent one. Until that happens the dead person is not fully settled. Anthropologists have read the interval as the mirror of the mourning period, the flesh going the way of the grief, and the clean bones marking that both processes are complete.
The practice has never been universal in Vietnam and is less common than it was, but it survives, and it explains features of Vietnamese cemeteries that are otherwise puzzling, including the pairing of a large first grave with a small permanent tomb.
The rites also survived a sustained attempt to reduce them. From the 1950s the government in the north campaigned against what it classified as superstition and waste, promoting simplified funerals, discouraging elaborate mourning and paper offerings, and setting up secular alternatives. The campaign changed the surface and did not remove the substance: families economised where they were watched and kept the anniversaries, and the practices returned openly with the reforms of the late 1980s. The episode is a useful check on the idea that ancestral rites are a survival that modernity quietly erodes. Here they were opposed directly, by a state with reach, and they outlasted the opposition.