Chinese Influence To American

15 Pages 3834 Words

ns to preserve their bodies, protect them from decaying as fast. Although the soul of the person was to move on, the Chinese wanted to save the body as a way to remember the elderly. To some people being buried in a coffin is so important that they rather spend their money on a coffin than on necessary provisions. Although burial in a coffin is preferred, cremations also take place. A cremation is when a corpse is placed on a pyre and burned to ashes. In the cities of present day China, because of the great overpopulation and lack of usable land, the government has made cremation a necessity. Cremation is also encouraged in rural areas in efforts of saving arable land for farming. Since the people living in the rural areas are farmers who can provide their own necessities and are independent of the government, they are more concerned with their traditional beliefs and practices than the concerns of the government. In the villages, peasants begin saving to buy coffins for themselves after they pass the age of sixty; which was considered the number of years a life cycle should be.2 People have claimed that if a person died before turning sixty years old, he/she was a “short-life devil.?Because of this belief, the people that died before turning the age of sixty years old were not buried and left wherever the happened to “drop.? To show how important burying the dead is, the Chinese hire elderly people who are familiar with the ancient wisdom of feng-shui, or the spirits of “the wind and water.?This type of ancient art was also called geomancy. The reason why the Chinese hire elderly people is because they want someone who is experienced in the field, not someone who’s new and had recently learned it from books. The Chinese believe that the more experience a person has, the more reliable is that person. The geomancer helped the dead select favorable sites for graves.4 These favorable sites not only had to be affordable to the famil...