China’s transport ministry expects a 20% drop in road traffic and a 55% fall in flights during the three-day Qingming holiday due to a flare-up of COVID-19 cases in the country.
The Qingming Festival is a traditional Chinese festival for honoring ancestors. During Qingming, Chinese families visit ancestors’ tombs and burn joss paper to make ritual offerings.
More than 27 Chinese provinces and regions have recently reported coronavirus cases, mostly the highly transmissible Omicron variant, forcing the authorities to impose stringent mobility restrictions or even city-wide lockdowns.
Local governments across China are requiring people to make appointments before visiting cemeteries to avoid crowds and encourage online memorials to rein in the risk of spreading COVID-19 during the Qingming Festival, also known as the tomb-sweeping day. Chinese typically travel back to their home towns to worship their ancestors during the festival.
It’s a festival to memorize the deceased ones and go out to enjoy the spring. On these days Chinese people have some traditional food such as green rice balls.
The Qingming Festival is celebrated on the first day of the fifth solar term of the traditional Chinese calendar. That is the 15th day after the Spring Equinox which, depending on the year, falls on the 4, 5, or 6th day of April. This year, it will be celebrated on April 5, though in places like China, the official celebrations are carried out from April 3rd to the 5th.
The average daily number of vehicles on the roads are estimated to reach 39-40 million during the holiday, which kicked off on April 3, down 21% from the same period last year, according to a statement from the Ministry of Transport.
The number of planned flights was forecast to decrease by 55% this holiday from the year before, with air travellers also at only 20% of last year’s levels, the ministry said.
Authorities across China have also implemented anti-COVID measures at entertainment sites during the Qingming holiday, including limiting the number of tourists and requesting for negative nucleic testing results from inter-provincial travellers.
The 3-day holiday of Qingming Festival is the peak period of tomb sweeping season. A million people are expected to visit cemeteries in Beijing. For epidemic prevention & control purposes, all cemeteries will require pre-booking, Health Kit app registration and temperature monitoring.
Qingming Festival is one of China’s traditional festivals, it began in the Zhou Dynasty, and has a history of more than 2500 years. It is also the tea picking season, commonly known as “tea before the Ming Dynasty”.
Families throughout China and other countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, start the celebrations by visiting the graveyards and tombstones of their ancestors to literally sweep them, repaint the names and adorn them with fruits and chrysanthemum flowers which symbolize wealth and grief respectively.
Traditionally, Chinese value tea made from the very first tea sprouts in spring that should be picked up before Qingming Festival, which falls on April 5 this year. Prized for their tenderness and aroma, tea leaves picked before the upcoming Qingming Festival are in demand. In Hunan, China, in addition to tomb sweeping, outing and kite flying, there is another equally important thing in Qingming Festival, that is to eat Artemisia seed Baba.
(All photos courtesy various Twitter accounts)