Chinese funeral rituals

While burial was favoured traditionally, in the present day, the dead are often cremated rather than buried, particularly in large cities in China.

In 1956, Mao Zedong declared that deceased people should be cremated instead of being buried to retain the amount of arable land.

Some had taken to hasten their deaths before the policy was introduced in their locations progressively, while officials faced resistance in their efforts to reclaim land by destroying cemeteries.

[7][8][9] A 2021 South China Morning Post article cited 12 instances of exhumations by officials of ground-buried bodies without family consent.

Families will usually gather to carry out funeral rituals, in order both to show respect for the dead and to strengthen the bonds of the kin group.

[12] Dà liàn (大殮) is the ritual of transferring the body of deceased into the coffin (入木 rù mù), which will rest in the funeral hall decorated with four-character idioms (成语 cheng yu) prior to the burial or cremation.

[6] Taoist or Buddhist prayers are sometimes carried out by monks, to help the deceased's soul to find peace and escape the fate of becoming a "restless ghost".

[16]: 105  The underlying tradition is that the spirits of those who have died at sea have difficulties because their relatives cannot make offerings to them and therefore they are more likely to become restless ghosts, and these rites may keep them from roaming.

[16]: 105 Every year at the Qing Ming Festival (清明節), people pay respect to their ancestors by visiting their graves and tidying up their tombstones.