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Qingming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day)
The Day of Pure Brightness — honoring ancestors and caring for their graves.
📅 April 4
✦ Why It Matters
Qingming is one of the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar and a major festival for ancestor veneration. It falls 15 days after the spring equinox, when families gather to tend graves, offer food and incense, and honor those who have passed.
✦ How It Is Observed
Visiting and cleaning ancestral graves, burning paper offerings (joss paper), making food offerings, flying kites (traditionally to release misfortune), planting trees, family gatherings outdoors.
✦ Sacred Text
“There is something mystically formed, born before heaven and Earth. In the silence and the void, standing alone and unchanging, ever present and in motion — perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things.”
— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25 ↗