Qingming

Qingming, the "Pure Brightness" or Tomb-Sweeping Festival, is a Chinese day for honouring the ancestors and the dead, kept in early April, about fifteen days after the spring equinox; unusually among Chinese festivals it is set by the solar terms of the traditional calendar rather than by the moon, falling on the day that opens the Qingming solar term, around 4-5 April. Its roots lie in ancient rites of ancestral reverence and in the older Cold Food Festival (Hanshi), with which it merged, and it gives expression to the deep Confucian value of filial piety (xiao) extended beyond death.

The festival's central act is the visit to the graves of the family's forebears: families travel, often long distances, to clean and tend the tombs, pulling weeds, repairing and sweeping the sites, and to make offerings of food, tea, wine and flowers, burning incense and, in a distinctive custom, paper money and paper models of goods for the use of the departed in the afterlife. The occasion also has a bright, outdoor side, coming as it does in spring: it is a traditional time for outings, walking in the new green, and flying kites, sometimes with lights attached for the night. Qingming thus binds the generations, cares for the dead, and welcomes the spring in a single observance, and it is a public holiday in China, Taiwan and among Chinese communities elsewhere.

Despite its ancient roots, Qingming was not an official public holiday in mainland China for most of the twentieth century: the People's Republic, in the decades following 1949, did not include it among the state's designated holidays, and traditional ancestor-focused observances were actively discouraged for periods under policies aimed at reducing what the state regarded as feudal or superstitious practice, so the tomb-sweeping visit continued, where it continued at all on the mainland, as an unofficial family custom rather than a day off recognised by the government.

The Chinese government restored Qingming as an official public holiday only in 2008, alongside the Dragon Boat Festival and the Mid-Autumn Festival, part of a broader policy shift that reintroduced a number of traditional festivals into the state calendar after decades of downplaying them, a change that gave millions of people paid time off specifically to travel and tend family graves for the first time in generations and that is widely read as part of a wider, ongoing state re-engagement with traditional Chinese culture rather than a simple administrative scheduling decision.

A further folk custom tied to the day, older than the tomb-sweeping visits themselves, is the wearing or hanging of willow branches: people traditionally inserted fresh willow twigs into their hair, doorways or gates on Qingming, a practice explained variously as a protection against wandering spirits believed to be especially active at this turning of the season and as a simple welcome of the new spring greenery, a custom still kept in some rural areas alongside the grave-tending that now dominates the day's observance.