by Sarah Murray
This is the Tin Chau Hong Worshipping Material store and the TVs, remotes, and everything else here are destined for the deceased relatives of Chinese families. Set light to them and, as pieces of silver cardboard turn to flakes of black ash, they’ll be whisked off into the afterlife for the enjoyment of the ancestor spirits. One of the biggest annual remembrance celebrations of the year is approaching. At Qing Ming (which on the first day of the fifth solar term, usually in early April), thousands of people go out to cemeteries on the hillsides around Hong Kong, tend to their family graves, and burn paper gifts for their ancestors in the netherworld.
The ancestors are a demanding bunch, it seems. To judge by what’s on the shelves here, you’ll need pretty much everything in the afterlife that you had (or would have liked to have had) in life. Most important—let’s not forget, this is Hong Kong—are paper gold ingots, as well as checkbooks, cardboard Amex cards, and paper money, complete with serial numbers and Chinese bank chops. Known as Hell Bank notes, each bears the signature and image of Yu Wang, the bearded and fearsome-looking Jade Emperor, and is countersigned by Yen Loo, the King of Hell.
Keeping up appearances is important in the netherworld, too, for the store is well stocked with shoes and clothing, as well as with accessories such as a shaving set, a hair dryer, and a set of dentures. There are gold wristwatches (Rolex, of course) and items of jewelry. The ladies’ shoes are particularly chic—yellow and pink ones with high heels, thin straps, and gold foil buckles. Smart paper suits, shirts and ties, and mandarin jackets are all folded neatly into boxes wrapped in cellophane. You can pick up a paper T-shirt or perhaps a zip-up jacket, for a more stylish ghostly moment. A cardboard iron (complete with string wiring and paper plug) will keep those paper clothes neatly pressed.
You’ve no reason to be bored in the afterlife either. As well as the plasma TVs, diversions include a cardboard mahjong set, a Game Boy, and an electric guitar. A couple of paper footballs and a cardboard-and-string tennis racquet hang above the store entrance. For the super-rich, whole houses are available for incineration, complete with effigies of servants. They take weeks to make and come fully furnished—although I don’t suppose they’re covered by fire insurance.
Meanwhile, the dinners for the dead will leave no one hungry. A display table in the center of the store is piled high with dim sum sets in small round baskets (steamed dumplings are crafted from tissue paper), fancy sponges and cupcakes (made from rubber foam), and boxes of swallow’s tongues, a rare Chinese delicacy, if rather tasteless in the cardboard version. For those who prefer junk food, there are six-packs of Coca-Cola (the name has been changed to “Caixin-Cele”), tubs of pot noodles, and a boxed set with a paper burger, fries, ketchup, and a soda. It’s an unhealthy diet on which to nourish your ancestors, but then since they’re already dead, why worry?
Burning paper objects for the ancestors is a Chinese tradition dating back centuries and reflects the traditional reverence for printed paper, which was associated with literacy and the trappings of a civilized society. However, manufacturers have always managed to keep up with times. A photograph taken by Sidney D. Gamble in Beijing in 1924 shows a life-size paper version of a Ford Model A, with movable wheels, working doors, a steering wheel, and a chauffeur dressed in a Chinese-style coat and a big western hat.
When I lived in Hong Kong in the 1980s, I was always intrigued as Qing Ming approached and shops would fill up with paper clothing, cardboard electronics, and other flammable goods. I love Hong Kong for this insane blend of hallowed custom and contemporary consumerism. In a city of dazzling skyscrapers, global financial markets, and expensive designer stores, you still find at the base of each soaring tower block a tiny red shrine where joss sticks burn and offerings of paper and food are laid out.
Living in Hong Kong, I treated Qing Ming like any public holiday—a precious extra day off in a place where few employers gave you more than two weeks’ annual vacation. News reports of the traffic jams (human and motorized) that built up across the territory as a sizeable chunk of Hong Kong’s seven-million-strong population headed out to the cemeteries gave me another incentive to stay at home and watch a movie.
So now I’ve come back to attend the Qing Ming festival, partly to find out what happens to all those paper objects, but also to observe a festival that demonstrates how we humans reinforce our relationships with the dead, maintaining a connection with them, wherever we think they are.
Once inside the Tin Chau Hong Worshipping Material store, I can’t resist buying some of its paper merchandise. First, I select a box set containing a paper gold watch, a pair of glasses, a smart silver cardboard cell phone, and a Louis Vuitton wallet with matching belt (the famous “LV” initials appear as “XV” in the paper version). I’ve got a pair of those high-heeled shoes, a basket of dim sum, and the cardboard electric iron (the neat freak within me insists). Then I collect great handfuls of gold bullion and stock up on cash—wads of those Hell Bank notes. The denominations are impressive (the highest is $100,000,000). If I can’t get rich in life, I’ll certainly be able to do so in death.
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Many people dismiss the notion that you can take material goods with you into the afterlife—my father, for one. He also held that obsessing about possessions while alive was a thoroughly bad idea. Possessions, he always said, were dispensable. “One day you have something. The next you don’t,” was his philosophical response to the removal from our house by burglars of a lovely antique French mantel clock (although he was very sad to lose it).
Fa relished the idea of giving everything away after his death. To divide his possessions up fairly, he announced one day, he’d be placing stickers on every item in the house. More valuable or interesting items would have, say, five stickers, while less desirable ones would only have one. When he died, he explained, we’d all have a quota of stickers and take turns choosing the things we wanted. For something more valuable or desirable, we’d have to forfeit more stickers.
What he didn’t explain was how he was going to put out the stickers once he was dead. However, true to his philosophy, toward the end of his life, he started giving away things—fishing equipment, binoculars, and the like—to people he knew would appreciate them. I have a few of the tools of his trade, including his tape measure, a beautiful object encased in leather with brass fittings. As an agricultural surveyor, he never went anywhere without it. I love to pull out the canvas tape with which he measured so many walls, doors, and windows.
I’ve tried to adopt Fa’s dispassionate attitude toward things—not always successfully. I once managed to remain calm when my Renault 5 disappeared from the place I’d parked it the previous evening. I later found out it had been towed, but at the time, I assumed it’d been stolen. “Once I had a car. Now I don’t,” I said to myself, thinking how proud Fa would be of my Zen-like approach to the whole affair—until I realized I was late for a dinner party and had no cash for a taxi. Then I completely lost it.
While I was very fond of that little car, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to take it to my grave (although I suppose like Ed Kienholz, I could’ve saved it as my coffin). Yet some people like to keep the more portable things they’ve acquired in life with them in death. For as well as getting relatives to burn goods for you in the afterlife, you can also be buried with them (the goods, not the relatives).
We all know the old saying, “You can’t take it with you,” but the funeral industry is helping us do precisely this. Among the features of the caskets manufactured by Batesville Casket Co., the giant coffin manufacturer, is the “MemorySafe Drawer,” which has a velvet interior in which, says Batesville, you can house “cherished keepsakes” or “private mementos,” such as Bibles, crosses, signet rings, and photographs of the family—perhaps even a mobile phone.
For if Ghanaians like to be buried inside giant wooden cell phones, a lot of people now want to be buried with their mobile devices. John Jacobs, a criminal defense attorney who died in 2005, was not
only buried with his cell phone, his wife Marion Seltzer put his number on the gravestone in the cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey. She continues to pay the monthly charge so that, although the phone’s batteries are as dead as their owner, callers can still leave voice mail for the former lawyer. “He would love this,” she told reporters. “He liked attention.”
Being buried with favorite possessions is not a new idea, of course. Providing the dead with grave goods, as they’re known, is a practice dating back to the world’s earliest civilizations. In southwest France, a bison leg with the flesh still attached was found in the tomb of a Neanderthal man who lived roughly seventy thousand years ago. Archaeologists think the leg was intended to leave the dead person with something to eat.
Anglo-Saxon kings also provisioned themselves richly. In 1939, excavations of a grassy mound in Suffolk, England, revealed a ninety-foot wooden vessel containing priceless treasures. The Sutton Hoo ship was the burial tomb of Raedwald, King of East Anglia, one of the country’s first monarchs. The king had himself buried with weapons, drinking horns, silver dishes, shoes, buckles, belts, and priceless jewels in gold and silver. The most famous item in the stash—now a star exhibit at the British Museum—is the king’s helmet. This magnificent masklike object, decorated with pictures of warriors, has a moustache, eyebrows, holes for the nostrils, and black eyeholes through which the ancient king seems to be staring out at us.
However, it was in 1974, when a farmer in northwest China was digging a well, that the most astonishing example of grave goods was unearthed, after more than two thousand years below ground. What the farmer found was the life-sized clay head of a warrior, the first clue to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century. That terra-cotta head belonged to an infantryman who was part of a seven-thousand-strong imperial army that included horsemen and charioteers, complete with bronze chariots made up of three thousand separate pieces.
The man who commissioned this army was Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, who lived between 259 and 210 BC. As well as shoring up his post-mortal military strength, the emperor had servants, acrobats, administrators, and officials fashioned from terra-cotta and buried with him. Pets were re-created, too, for bronze birds have been found in the burial pits. Perhaps most remarkable is the individual workmanship on the soldiers, each with different facial features, clothing, armor, and body types. These figures weren’t conceived as public art or pieces of sculpture. They were practical tools, essential for battles in the next world.
These grave goods may represent just a fraction of what lies beneath the huge mysterious mound east of the city of Xian. The tomb itself has not been excavated yet, but it’s thought to be at the heart of an immense underground metropolis covering an area about the size of Manhattan, with lavish palaces whose chambers contain treasures of untold richness. Writing a century after the tomb was constructed, Han historian Sima Qian describes how more than seven thousand men from all over the empire were brought to the site to work on a project of breathtaking ambition—an entire imperial infrastructure, all for the emperor’s convenience in the afterlife.
In 2008, the British Museum managed to secure a loan of twelve terra-cotta soldiers, as well as eight acrobats—the largest group ever to leave China. The exhibition was a hit. Opening hours had to be extended until midnight to cope with the crowds. When I tried to book a ticket a month in advance, none were available so I turned up early one morning hoping to get one of the five hundred tickets released every day. After lining up for an hour and a half, I secured an entry—at 12:10 P.M. precisely, I was told.
Once inside the dimly lit dome of the museum’s magnificent Reading Room, temporarily converted to house the show, the atmosphere was tomblike. Hundreds of people huddled around the displays of gold, bronze, and ceramic objects. Visitors were so tightly clustered around the exhibits that without joining the slow, shuffling line, it was impossible to see anything, so I headed into the second half of the exhibition to view the soldiers themselves.
I’d seen them before. On a 1986 trip around China, I visited the site in Xian. Looking down at ranks of the clay figures from a wooden platform, it was the sheer numbers that had impressed me. Here in the British Museum, it was their humanity. I was on the same level as the individual figures, staring them in the eyes, scrutinizing their features, their hairstyles, and their uniforms—every detail created for an existence in the afterlife.
I couldn’t help wondering what Qin Shi Huang would have thought had he known that, centuries after his death, some of his soldiers would end up thousands of miles away, a trip that would take them via Beijing on a series of jumbo jets to London, where they would be loaded into trucks, delivered to the exhibition halls of the British Museum, and positioned beneath high-tech lighting.
More than 850,000 people visited the soldiers in London, while another 400,000 or so saw them when the show moved to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Newspapers published features about the warriors, postcards and glossy exhibition catalogues were printed, and a BBC TV documentary was made about how the show was staged. The emperor Qin Shi Huang had badly wanted to live on. And perhaps he really is out there in the afterlife, conquering new territories with his terra-cotta army. But if not, his wish for eternal life has still been fulfilled—albeit in a way he might not have predicted.
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Otto von Bismarck, the nineteenth-century German aristocrat statesman, was unequivocal in his assessment of the life beyond. “Without the hope of an afterlife,” he famously proclaimed, “this life is not even worth the effort of getting dressed in the morning.” As an energetic and influential politician, Bismarck’s belief presumably did allow him to get dressed every morning, and perhaps he was happier for it. Studies have found that confidence in the existence of an afterlife—at least of a pleasant one—is associated with better mental health, although the authors of such studies admit that happier, more positive people are those more likely to embrace such belief.
As an optimistic atheist, my father needed no such reassurance in order to get dressed every morning. Quite the contrary—he was an extremely early riser and loved to boast about how many years he was adding to his life by waking a couple of hours earlier than the rest of the family. My approach to life is similar. If this is all there is then, as the song goes, “Let’s keep dancing.” Let’s enjoy every last moment of it, get up as early as possible, and go to bed way too late (although it helps to take a nap in the afternoon).
Still, in our lack of faith in an afterlife, my father and I seem in the minority. Few Americans doubt its existence. In a survey of people over the age of fifty, three-quarters of respondents agreed with the statement, “I believe in life after death,” according to the AARP, which conducted the survey in 2007. About half said they believed in the existence of ghosts or spirits, while almost nine in ten respondents confirmed that they believed in heaven. Two-thirds claimed their confidence in life after death had strengthened with age. Even Woody Allen once remarked, “I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.”
So if most people hope to reach an afterlife, what do they expect to find when they get there? The answer is, different things. For the Chinese, thoughts of the netherworld call up images of an island far out into the ocean or a haven somewhere in the sacred mountains of the west (although if Hong Kong’s paper goods or Qin Shi Huang’s terra-cotta armies are anything to go by, the Chinese afterlife may not look that different from real life).
In the Christian world, heaven is a beautiful paradise, a reward for the faithful, and a place for reunion with loved ones. Muslims espouse a similar vision, enriched with promises of milk, honey, and, at least for men, pleasures of the flesh that were forbidden on earth.
For some, heaven is not necessarily the first stop after death. Christians may have a spell in purgatory, a temporary condition during which the soul is purified. In Eastern religions, you may have to live several lifetimes via the proces
s of reincarnation before you get there. Yet even these secondary lives offer the potential for something better. For India’s Hindu untouchables, a belief in reincarnation helps them tolerate life at the bottom of the social and economic pyramid, raising the hope of an improvement in status next time around.
Traditional death rituals are all about the afterlife. What we do at the funeral plays a critical role in helping the dead reach whatever heaven they’ve been looking forward to, for the funeral sits at the intersection between two worlds—the one the deceased recently inhabited, and the one to which he or she is now headed.
So we send our dead off with handfuls of goodwill, bucketfuls of love, and the occasional sigh of relief. But we also burn paper offerings for them; bury them with food, clothes, and precious jewels; and recite prayers or chant spells. We bind the corpse into a fetal position, sending it out of the world in the manner in which it entered it. We mummify the dead, equipping them with the well-preserved bodies they require in the Egyptian afterlife. We place coins on their eyes to pay the ferryman to take them to the other side.
The dead also need a mode of transport. The Vikings had their ships—symbols of Norse power in life—as graves. Fire, as Hindus will tell you, is also a powerful engine, speeding the soul into the next life amid a burst of flames, whether via cremation in the giant effigy of a Balinese cow or on a pyre by the Ganges in the holy city of Varanasi.
And as with any trip, cash, maps, and directions come in handy. The lid of the inner coffin of Hornedjitef, an Egyptian priest, is decorated with a chart of the heavens as a navigation aid. A copy of the Book of the Dead—a sort of guidebook written by a priest on a papyrus roll—also helped Egyptian mummies plot a course through the difficult and dangerous passage to the afterlife. The Tibetans have a similar book, which illuminates the paths humans take between death and rebirth.