Mijiawu, China---Gleaming gold watches and smartphones are piled high in a ramshackle Chinese farmhouse -- all replicas made of paper and designed to be incinerated, as 21st-century consumerism transforms the age-old market in offerings to ancestors.
"Our work is serving the dead," said Pu Shuzhen, as female workers with glue guns folded paper into imitations of Louis Vuitton handbags and iPhones in her dirt-floored house turned workshop.
China celebrates "Tomb Sweeping Festival" on Sunday, when millions burn paper offerings to their ancestors in a tradition believed to date back thousands of years.
Pu's workshop is one of hundreds hidden inside crumbling courtyards in Hebei, a province bordering Beijing which local farmers have transformed into the centre of the country's funeral products industry.
"Before we were growing corn and potatoes. It was tough," Pu said. "The money from this is better than farming."
Mahjong tables, jewel boxes and cigarettes sell well, she said. Other items include imitation house ownership certificates and more practical goods such as toothpaste, toothbrushes and shoes.
"They are just the same as living people use," she said. "It was like that in ancient times too. It's a tradition handed down from our ancestors."
Offerings to the dead have been found at some of China's oldest grave sites.
"The products express an emotion: we are living well, and we hope our ancestors can live just as well in their world," said factory owner Zhang Guilai, as a vast press roared in the background pressing out paper houses.
- Grave issues -
Beijing declared tomb sweeping festival -- just one of many traditional dates for honouring ancestors -- a national holiday in 2007.
The move was a marked contrast to Mao Zedong's rule when the officially atheist Communist party condemned tomb offerings as feudal, graves were desecrated and traditions driven underground.
"During Mao Zedong's time it was all about opposing superstition... and we would have to give offerings in secret," said Pu's husband, Zhao Yansheng. "But now it's a national holiday... and we can celebrate openly."
Even so, official attitudes are still sometimes ambivalent.
China's civil affairs ministry this year vowed on its website to step up controls on "burning paper money, offerings and other uncivilised tomb sweeping behaviour", while also "preventing the use of vulgar and superstitious grave offerings".
AFP
