Introduction: Starting from the Definition of "Human"
Chinese culture's definition of the "human" has always been bound up with funerals and burial. The Mencius, in "Li Lou II," states that "caring for the living is not enough to count as a great matter; only sending off the dead can count as a great matter," elevating funeral rites to the foremost duty of human life. From the Upper Cave Man burials of the Paleolithic era, where remains were strewn with red hematite powder, to the meticulous regulations constructed in the Yili (Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial), and on to the diverse practices of contemporary urban and rural areas, funeral customs have always been the core arena in which Chinese people settle life, organize society, and express ethics. Taking "careful attendance to the end and remembrance of those long gone" as its thread, this article sorts out the ethical structure, historical evolution, and regional variations of funeral rituals, examining how they sustain family continuity and social order through the ritual logic of "serving the dead as one serves the living." The article discusses in turn the ethical foundations of funeral rites, their ritual procedures, historical transformations, regional forms, contemporary transitions, and scholarly reflections, presenting the complete trajectory of this "ritual of rituals."
1. The Ethical Foundations of Funeral Rites: Filial Piety, Soul and Spirit, and Ancestor Worship
The reason funeral rites occupy a central place in Chinese culture lies in their profound ethical foundations. Confucianism regards "filial piety" as the root of benevolence, and the ultimate test of filial piety lies in "carefully attending to the end." The Analects, in the "Xue Er" chapter, records Zengzi's words: "Carefully attend to the end and pursue the distant, and the virtue of the people will return to fullness." Zheng Xuan glossed "carefully attend to the end" as "exhausting grief in mourning" and "pursuing the distant" as "exhausting reverence in sacrifice," the two together forming a complete ethical chain from death to sacrifice. Funeral rites are not merely an expression of emotion but also a mechanism of moral edification. In the Analects, in the "Yang Huo" chapter, Confucius criticized Zai Wo for wishing to shorten the "three-year mourning" to one year, denouncing him as "lacking benevolence," on the grounds that "a child is born and only after three years does he escape from his parents' arms," directly correlating the duration of mourning with the grace of upbringing. This approach of ethicizing time made funeral rites a measure of personal character. Through the ritual rhythm of "encoffining after three days, burial after three months," the living gradually accept the departure of the deceased while confirming their own place in the chain of the family.
The concept of soul and spirit provided the cosmological foundation for funeral rites. The Book of Rites, in the "Jiao Te Sheng" chapter, states: "The soul-breath returns to Heaven, the bodily spirit returns to Earth." The ancients believed that a person is composed of soul and spirit, and after death the soul ascends to Heaven while the spirit returns to Earth. Therefore, funeral rites included both rituals for summoning the soul and restoring the spirit, and procedures for burying the body. The "fu" ritual recorded in the Yili, in the "Shi Sang Li" chapter—in which a person holds the deceased's upper garment, climbs to the roof, faces north, and calls the name three times; if there is no response, the funeral proceedings begin—was precisely a final attempt to retain the soul and spirit before they dispersed. The T-shaped silk painting unearthed from Han Tomb No. 1 at Mawangdui in Changsha visually presents the cosmological picture of the separation and destination of soul and spirit through images of three realms: Heaven, the human world, and the underworld. The upper section depicts the sun, moon, ascending dragons, and deities with human heads and serpent bodies; the middle section shows the tomb occupant, Lady Xin Zhui, and her attendants; the lower section features a giant holding up the earth. This silk painting is both a burial object and a visual expression of the concept of soul and spirit.
Ancestor worship further transformed individual death into a node in the continuity of the family. The Book of Rites, in the "Ji Yi" chapter, says: "All living beings must die, and after death must return to the earth; this is what is called a ghost." But a ghost is not an end; through sacrifice, ancestors continue to participate in family affairs, forming a cyclical structure of "life—death—sacrifice." The temple system established in the Zhou dynasty—seven temples for the Son of Heaven, five for feudal lords, three for senior officials, one for scholars, and sacrifices in the bedchamber for commoners—incorporated ancestor worship into a hierarchical order. The "Ri Shu" among the Qin bamboo slips from Shuihudi in Yunmeng, Hubei, already contains records such as "sacrificing to father and mother" and "sacrificing to ancestors," indicating that by at least the late Warring States period, popular ancestor sacrifice was already quite widespread. This worship made funeral rites not only a farewell to the deceased but also a reaffirmation of the triple relationship between the living, their ancestors, and their descendants.
2. Ritual Procedure: The Complete Chain from Initial Death to Mourning
The Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial, "Funeral Rites for an Officer" and the Book of Rites, "Great Record of Mourning" together construct the standard procedure of funeral rites, which can be roughly divided into stages: initial death, minor dressing, major dressing, assuming mourning garments, opening the bier, audience at the ancestral temple, ancestral offering, departure offering, burial, returning to weep, the Yu sacrifice, the cessation of weeping, the fu sacrifice, the minor auspicious sacrifice, the major auspicious sacrifice, and the removal of mourning. At the moment of initial death, the "recall" rite was performed, that is, summoning the soul: one person would take the deceased's upper garment, climb onto the roof, face north, and call the name; only after three calls went unanswered would the funeral affairs begin. Thereafter, a curtained hall was set up, obituaries were issued, the body was washed, and the rice and jade was placed in the mouth. The rice and jade was an important step. According to the Rites of Zhou, "Offices of Earth, Superintendent of Offerings" and the Book of Rites, "Miscellaneous Records," "the Son of Heaven had a pearl placed in the mouth, the feudal lords jade, the grand officers a bi-disc, the officers a cowrie shell, and the common people grain," reflecting differences in rank. Minor dressing took place the next day, clothing the deceased. According to the Book of Rites, "Great Record of Mourning," during minor dressing, "the officer washed his hands over the basin, and the officer lifted and moved the corpse onto the garments," requiring nineteen sets of clothes. Major dressing took place on the third day, placing the body in the coffin, with even more clothes used: thirty sets for an officer, fifty for a grand officer, and one hundred for a ruler. Assuming mourning garments meant wearing the five degrees of mourning according to closeness of kinship: the unhemmed sackcloth, the hemmed sackcloth, the nine-month mourning, the five-month mourning, and the three-month mourning. The unhemmed sackcloth used the coarsest raw hemp cloth, without hemmed edges, and lasted three years, worn for a father, husband, or ruler; the hemmed sackcloth used slightly coarser hemp cloth, with hemmed edges, and lasted from three years to three months; the nine-month mourning lasted nine months, the five-month mourning five months, and the three-month mourning three months, decreasing in order.
The funeral procession and burial were the climax of the ceremony. After the bier was opened, the coffin was brought to the ancestral temple for the audience-at-the-ancestral-temple rite, symbolizing the deceased's farewell to the ancestors. The Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial, "Rites of the Evening of the Day of Death," records in detail the positions, invocations, and offerings at the ancestral audience. The ancestral offering and departure offering proceeded in order, and then the coffin was led out to the burial ground. At burial, it was necessary to divine the grave site, dig the pit, lower the coffin, and raise the mound. The Rites of Zhou, "Spring Offices, Superintendent of Tombs" states, "He was in charge of the land of the public cemetery, distinguished its boundaries, and made maps of them," showing that cemetery planning was already institutionalized. When lowering the coffin, ropes and a wooden post were used to let it down slowly, while the filial son "wailed and leaped without count." After the rite of returning to weep, the Yu sacrifice was performed to pacify the soul. The Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial, "Yu Sacrifice for an Officer" stipulates that the Yu sacrifice was performed three times in total, on the day of burial, the next day, and the day after that. After the Yu sacrifice came the cessation of weeping and the fu sacrifice, attaching the deceased's spirit tablet to the ancestral temple. Thereafter began the long period of mourning: three years for the unhemmed sackcloth (actually twenty-five months), from three years to three months for the hemmed sackcloth, nine months for the nine-month mourning, five months for the five-month mourning, and three months for the three-month mourning. During mourning there were strict prohibitions: no marriage, no drinking wine, no music, no attending banquets; officials also had to resign from office to observe the mourning period, called "observing filial mourning."
This procedure was simplified in Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, but its core structure continued into modern times. The Family Rituals, "Mourning Rites" changed "burial after three months" to "burial after three months" but allowed "adapting to circumstances," and emphasized "not performing Buddhist rites." In the Family Rituals, Zhu Xi deleted many elaborate steps, such as the "double coffin" and the "feather fan," making them easier for families of officers and commoners to carry out. In popular practice, however, "ritual" and "custom" often proceeded side by side; practices such as "doing the sevens" and "burning paper" do not appear in the Family Rituals, yet were widely popular. This interaction between the "great tradition" and the "little tradition" constituted the driving force in the evolution of funeral rites.
3. Historical Evolution: Ritual and Popularization from the Pre-Qin to the Ming and Qing
In the pre-Qin period, funeral rites were mainly practiced among the aristocratic class. The Zuo Commentary records a large number of instances of funerals of feudal lords; for example, after Duke Wen of Jin died, his coffin was "kept in Quwo," reflecting the ritual of "keeping the coffin in the ancestral temple." In the thirty-second year of Duke Xi it is recorded: "In winter, Duke Wen of Jin died. On the gengchen day, the coffin was to be kept in Quwo." Du Yu's commentary states: "Bin means to inter the coffin. Quwo had an old palace, hence the coffin was kept there." After the Qin and Han unified the realm, funeral rites gradually became institutionalized. The funeral rites of Han emperors were extremely grand. According to the Book of Han, "Biography of Huo Guang," after Huo Guang's death he was "granted one set each of a catalpa coffin, a side chamber, and a yellow-heart cypress chamber, and fifteen outer coffins of fir wood." The "yellow-heart cypress chamber" refers to stacking cypress wood with yellow heart outside the coffin, which was the burial system for the Son of Heaven. Emperor Wu of Han's Maoling tomb was "entirely made into a mausoleum at Maoling," with abundant burial goods. According to the Book of Han, "Biography of Gong Yu," "as for Maoling, it stored much money and valuables, birds, beasts, fish, turtles, cattle, horses, tigers, leopards, and live animals, altogether one hundred and ninety kinds." At the same time, popular funeral customs began to merge with Confucian ritual institutions, and the system of "recommending the filial and incorrupt" appeared, while the trend of lavish burial flourished. The pictorial stones in the Wu Family Shrine at Jiaxiang, Shandong, contain many scenes of funerals and sacrifices, which can be regarded as visual historical materials of Han dynasty funeral rites.
During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the introduction of Buddhism brought new rituals such as the "seven-seventh fast" and the Ullambana Assembly, and the concepts of hell and reincarnation influenced burial practices. The Record of the Monasteries of Luoyang states that in Northern Wei Luoyang, "on the seventh day of the fourth month, all the officials of the capital came" to attend the Ullambana Assembly. The Buddhist doctrine of the "seven sevens" held that after death each seven-day period formed one stage, and only after seven times seven, forty-nine days, would one receive rebirth; therefore the popular practice of "doing the sevens" flourished, with monks and Daoist priests invited to chant scriptures. This created a tension in timing with the Confucian "burial after three months," but in the end the two were reconciled in popular practice. In the Tang dynasty, the Great Tang Kaiyuan Rites systematically regulated funeral rites, and the five degrees of mourning were further refined. According to volumes 146 to 150 of the Kaiyuan Rites, the funeral rites of officials included initial death, summoning the soul, changing clothes, announcing the death, bathing, placing food in the mouth, dressing the corpse, minor dressing, major dressing, assuming mourning garments, and so on, with a strict and orderly procedure. Dunhuang documents such as P.2622, the Model Letters for Auspicious and Inauspicious Occasions, reflect the actual conditions of Tang popular funeral customs.
During the Song and Ming periods, funeral rites underwent an important turn. Sima Guang's Book of Ceremonies and Zhu Xi's Family Rituals sought to reconstruct Confucian funeral rites in response to the proliferation of "vulgar rites" at the time. In volume 5 of the Book of Ceremonies, Sima Guang criticized those who "follow the deceptive enticements of Buddhists, and at the time of initial death, on the seven-seventh day, the hundredth day, the first anniversary, the second anniversary, and at the end of mourning, feed monks and establish Daoist rites, or hold land and water assemblies, copy scriptures and make images, and build pagodas and temples," and advocated "not performing Buddhist services." Zhu Xi's Family Rituals was more systematic, dividing funeral rites into initial death, bathing, dressing the corpse, offerings, establishing the position, placing food in the mouth, the spirit seat, the soul cloth, the name banner, minor dressing, major dressing, assuming mourning garments, morning and evening weeping and offerings, serving food, condolence offerings and funeral gifts, hearing of a death and hastening to mourning, arranging the burial, moving the coffin, paying respects to the ancestors, condolence gifts, arranging the vessels, the farewell offering, the departure of the funeral procession, burial, the return and weeping, the yu sacrifice, the conclusion of weeping, the fu sacrifice, the minor auspicious sacrifice, the major auspicious sacrifice, and the termination of mourning, and also drew diagrams of mourning garments. However, popular customs such as "doing the sevens" and "burning paper" were already deeply rooted. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, funeral rites formed a tension between the official and popular spheres: the official side adhered to the framework of the Family Rituals, as when Emperor Taizu of Ming during the Hongwu reign established the Collected Rites of the Great Ming, and when the Qing during the Qianlong reign compiled the Comprehensive Rites of the Great Qing, both using the Family Rituals as their model; the popular side developed elaborate rituals such as "receiving the third," "sending the treasury," and "dotting the spirit tablet." The description of Li Ping'er's funeral in The Plum in the Golden Vase, from "minor dressing" to "major dressing," and from the "first seven" to the "final seven," displays a detailed picture of the funeral rites of a wealthy household in Shandong in the mid-Ming period. The Comprehensive Rites of the Great Qing of the Qing dynasty had detailed regulations for the funeral rites of officials, but the funeral rites of commoners were mostly carried out according to custom.
4. Regional Forms: Diverse Practices of the Han and Ethnic Minorities
Han Chinese burial customs are predominantly based on earth burial, yet regional differences are striking. The Central Plains region, most deeply influenced by Confucianism, observes especially rigorous rituals. In Henan and Shandong, for example, funeral rites in former times typically included stages such as "keeping vigil over the corpse," "encoffining," "the funeral procession," "interment," "rounding the grave," "burning on the sevens," "the hundredth day," and "the anniversary." "Burning on the sevens" counted from the day of death, with paper money burned once every seven days until the forty-ninth day, the seventh seven; of these, the "fifth seven" was the most solemn, and a folk saying held that "without the fifth seven and the third anniversary, the rites are not complete." In Shanxi, Shaanxi, and elsewhere, "mourning wails" prevailed, in which filial sons and daughters chanted laments to specific tunes, usually recounting the deeds of the deceased in life. In southern Han regions such as Fujian and Guangdong, where clan organizations were well developed, funerals were often combined with ancestral hall sacrifices, giving rise to rituals such as "the funeral procession circling the ancestral hall" and "entering the ancestral hall." In parts of Zhejiang, "doing merit" was practiced, hiring Daoist priests or Buddhist monks to perform rites to deliver the soul of the dead.
The funeral forms of ethnic minorities are even more varied. Tibetans practice sky burial; according to the Testament of the Kings of Tibet, sky burial originated in the Buddhist notion of "giving one's body to feed the tiger," and the corpse is carried to a sky burial platform, where a sky burial master dismembers it and feeds it to vultures, believed to carry the soul into heaven. Mongolians formerly practiced open-field burial, leaving the corpse in the wilderness for birds and beasts to consume, though later most adopted earth burial. The Naxi of Yunnan practice cremation; according to the Dongba scripture The Road to the Gods, cremation enables the soul to follow the "road of the gods" back to the ancestral homeland. The Zhuang of Guangxi practice "secondary burial," that is, earth burial first, then after several years the bones are gathered into a ceramic urn and reburied in a newly chosen site. The Miao of Guizhou practice "cave burial," placing coffins in natural caves to dwell together with the ancestors. These diverse practices show that burial is not merely a Han cultural phenomenon but an expression of the diversity within the Chinese national community.
Regional differences are also reflected in grave goods. In Neolithic Yangshao culture tombs, everyday utensils such as pottery bowls and jars are commonly found; in Shang dynasty aristocratic tombs, bronze ritual vessels prevailed, as in the more than four hundred bronze objects unearthed from the tomb of Fu Hao at Yinxu in Anyang; the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng from the Warring States period yielded sixty-five chime bells, displaying the utmost of "serving the dead as one serves the living." After the Han dynasty, pottery mingqi (spirit articles) became widespread, such as pottery granaries, stoves, and pigsties, reflecting the manorial economy. In the Tang dynasty, sancai mingqi appeared, such as sancai horses and camels, related to Silk Road trade. In the Song dynasty, paper mingqi became popular; according to the Records of the Dreams of the Eastern Capital, at the Qingming festival "paper horse shops all along the streets folded paper into the shapes of towers and pavilions." These changes in grave goods reflect both material culture and shifting beliefs.
5. Contemporary Transformation: Institutional Change from "Thick Burial" to "Ritual Burial"
Since the twentieth century, funeral customs have undergone profound changes. During the Republican period, new-style funerals emerged, such as the "memorial meeting" replacing the traditional "opening of mourning," bowing replacing kneeling, and black armbands replacing mourning garments. In 1929, the Ministry of the Interior of the Nationalist Government promulgated the Draft Funeral Rites, stipulating that "all funerals shall take solemnity and frugality as their principle," but among the common people many old customs still persisted. After 1949, funeral reform was gradually advanced. In 1956, Mao Zedong and other leaders advocated cremation; in 1985 the State Council issued the Interim Provisions on the Administration of Funerals and Interments; and in 1997 the Regulations on the Administration of Funerals and Interments formally took effect, promoting cremation and restricting burial. According to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in 2020 the national cremation rate was about 53.1 percent, but the urban-rural gap was striking: the cremation rate in cities exceeded 90 percent, while in some rural areas burial still predominated.
Contemporary funerals present a situation in which "simplification" and "commercialization" coexist. On the one hand, traditional rituals such as "doing the sevens" and "burning paper" have been simplified in cities and replaced by farewell ceremonies for the remains and memorial gatherings; on the other hand, the funeral service industry has expanded rapidly, giving rise to "one-stop" services that form a complete industrial chain from burial clothes and hearses to cemetery plots. Cemetery prices have soared; in places such as Shanghai and Beijing, commercial public cemetery plots can cost tens of thousands of yuan per square meter, triggering social discussion about "not being able to afford to die." At the same time, ecological forms of burial have arisen, such as tree burial, sea burial, and flowerbed burial. According to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, in 2021 the national rate of ecological interment was about 5 percent; although the proportion is not high, it is on the rise.
The tension between law and ethics has also become increasingly prominent. Article 1060 of the Civil Code stipulates that "the capacity for civil rights of a natural person begins at birth and ends at death," yet the protection of personality interests extends after death, such as reputation, portrait, and privacy. Although the traditional "five degrees of mourning" system has withdrawn from the law, its ethical logic still lies latent in kinship relations and the order of inheritance. The transformation of contemporary funerals is not merely a simplification of ritual but a deeper shift in social structure and values.
6. Scholarly Reflections: Paradigms and Controversies in the Study of Funerary Rites
The study of funerary rites involves multiple disciplines, including history, anthropology, folklore studies, and sociology. Early research focused primarily on the textual verification of ritual institutions, such as Ling Tingkan's Explanations and Precedents of the Ritual Classics and Hu Peihui's Correct Meaning of the Yili from the Qing dynasty, which provided sentence-by-sentence exegesis of the funerary sections of the Yili (Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial). Since the twentieth century, anthropological perspectives have been introduced. For example, Yang Qingkun's Religion in Chinese Society treats funerary rites as a religious phenomenon, while Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, edited by Arthur Wolf, explores the social functions of ancestor worship. Fei Xiaotong's From the Soil explains the kinship distinctions embodied in the "five degrees of mourning attire" in funerary rites from the perspective of the "differential mode of association."
New trends have emerged in recent research. The first is the "interaction between ritual and custom" paradigm, such as David Faure's Emperor and Ancestor, which explores the relationship between funerary rites and lineage construction in South China. The second is the "material culture" turn, such as Wu Hung's Art of the Yellow Springs, which analyzes tomb art and concepts of the soul. The third is the "history of emotions" perspective, such as recent scholars' research on "mourning wails," treating the sound of weeping as a dual text of emotional expression and social performance. The fourth is the "global history" perspective, such as comparisons of the similarities and differences between Chinese funerary rites and Christian and Islamic burial practices. Controversies also persist, such as whether Confucian funerary rites suppress emotion, and whether Buddhism's influence on funerary rites represents fusion or replacement—questions that still await deeper investigation.
Contemporary funerary rite research also faces the urgency of "documentation" and "preservation." With urbanization and population mobility, many local funerary customs are disappearing. After the promulgation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Law of the People's Republic of China in 2011, some funerary customs were included in intangible cultural heritage lists, such as the sacrificial rituals in the "Shaoxing Shunwang Temple Fair" and the "Mazu Sacrificial Ceremony." But on the whole, funerary rites, as the "ritual of rituals," have yet to receive sufficient recognition for their scholarly value and social significance. How to perpetuate the ethical spirit of "carefully attending to the end and reverently pursuing the distant" in modern society, rather than simply preserving the outer shell of ritual, is a question that both academia and the public must face together.
Conclusion
Funeral and mourning customs are one of the most continuous ritual traditions in Chinese culture. From the strict regulations of the Yili to the simplified reconstruction of Zhu Xi's Family Rituals, from the pre-Qin aristocracy's "mourning in the ancestral temple" to the contemporary city's "memorial gathering," their surface forms have constantly changed, yet the ethical core of "carefully attending to the end and pursuing the distant" has never changed. Through the ritual logic of "serving the dead as one serves the living," funeral rites transform individual death into a node in the continuity of the family, and a biological fact into a cultural event. They are both a settling of emotion and a reproduction of order.
Faced with the aging and urbanization of contemporary society, the transformation of funeral and mourning customs is inevitable. But transformation does not equal rupture. The promotion of cremation and ecological burial needs to be coordinated with the ethical spirit of "carefully attending to the end," rather than replacing humanistic care with administrative efficiency. The future direction of funeral rites may lie in strengthening their ethical function while simplifying the rituals—allowing the living, through bidding farewell to the dead, to reconfirm their own place within the family and society. This is both the inspiration of traditional funeral rites and a task for modern civilization.