I have wondered about this for a while now: Everytime I pass by a graveyard, the graves are overgrown with weeds, pots and vases are brocken, tombstones shattered here and there and the overall look reminds more of a dumpsite for the dead rather than a graveyard.
For a culture that is deeply spiritual and superstitious of the wrath of the dead and ghosts, has a dedicated tomb sweeping holiday and honors their elderly and ancestry, I get the impression that Taiwanese don’t give a single shit about their dead relatives. Please help me make sense of this:
Am I only seeing historical graveyard sites here in the south that are more of a historical landmark with no remaining living relatives to care for these graves (weird when thinking of the prices for land in Taiwan…) or is all this religious tam-tam here just a load of pretentious bs?
When I was living in Taiwan, the family gathered together on Tomb Sweeping Day and cleaned the overgrowth, yearly. Some sites remained overgrown, reason being open to speculation.
They look like shit for sure typical unorganized and non communal Chinese mentality , but people still care to go and clean it up once a year and pray at the sites. many gravesites have had the bones moved to somewhere else now such as temples and funeral pagodas. So they are abandoned in some cases and even destroyed when they were removing the bones.
And yes some don’t have any other relatives left to care for them or they lost the connection to the area.
More and more you get graveyards being reclaimed too and built on so yeah they can get over the superstition when money is involved.
Yeah, I totally get that vibe too. Although I think the difference is that for those Taiwanese who believes in traditional burial and rituals, most of the worship is done at home to the name plate of the ancestors. Therefore instead of going to a well manicured graveyard to commemorate the deceased like one do in the US, they really only go to the graveyard once a year. Also many graves are in locations incredibly difficult to get to because fengsui and perhaps also practicality require the graves to be built on hills, and most of them had no planning or organization body.
If someone is rich and famous though, it would be very well manicured, even if families still only visits once a year.
I just passed by a graveyard in the south of xiaoliuqiu and it looked as if a group of teenagers destroyed everything with baseball bats and nature claimed it back afterwards.
I was a bit shocked at how run-down it looked, especially when comparing it to graveyards in Germany that are impecably clean most of the time with often fresh flowers and clean moist soil despite Germans not being overly religious so I assumed this would be the standard all over the developed world. Our elderly attend to the graves of their relatives in a almost weekly or monthly manner.
My FIL builds and cleans tombs for people. Most of his business if from rich families that can’t be arsed to do it themselves. He does fairly well, but he’s getting a bit old now and it’s hard work. No one in the next generation wants to continue it, so people like him are getting harder and harder to find, once he retires there may well be a few more tombs that turn to shit.
To be fair, probably a good many spite their elders. If they didn’t, and were ultra superstitious, they would be cleaned more than once annually, by proxy
Paying people to pray to ash is common here as well. But is often quite pricey, as many religious things tend to be. Those tend to be were the superstitious people that don’t hate their relatives and have money congregate. We are due, in a couple weeks, to go pray to a shelving unit as well.
