With paper replicas of an iPhone, villa and golden pigs in his car, Luo Guofu has driven over 700 km to mourn his deceased father on the upcoming Chinese Tomb-sweeping Day.

"It is a 'soul redemption' for me to present him with something special. I would rather pay big money for spiritual peace," says Luo of offerings which this year cost him about 8,000 yuan (1,290 U.S. dollars).

Like millions of Chinese, he has spent considerable sums on items to be burned in a sacrificial practice that has become highly commercialized.

Tomb-Sweeping Day, which falls on Thursday, is a time for Chinese to commemorate the dead. Also known as the Qingming Festival, it is traditional on this occasion for surviving relatives to tend the graves of their loved ones by leaving food and liquor at their burial sites and burning fake money as an offering.

In recent years, however, the offerings have been updated to include other modern trappings of prosperity in replica form. While critics have decried the accompanying ramping-up of costs, many like Luo have plumped for buying the now-infamous paper iPhones.

"Witnessing him die on a train journey back home has left me with a life-long pain," says Luo, whose father passed away three years ago while traveling from south China's Guangzhou to their native village in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. He was buried in Guangxi's Nanning City.

Luo, a 38-year-old IT engineer in Guangzhou, left his village and parents at the age of 16 to pursue his education and then career for over 20 years.

For dozens of years, Spring Festival family reunions were generally the only chance he got to see his father until he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and died three month later in 2010.

"After I was forever apart from him, I always felt spiritually empty in my busy urban life. I would like to try my best to pay him back, and this is the only way possible," Luo explains.
Chinese people burn over 1,000 tonnes of paper products on Tomb-Sweeping Day. The so-called "white consumption" of sacrificial offerings amounted to about 10 billion yuan within the 24 hours in 2012, according to the China Consumers' Association.

This year, a surging trend of luxury sacrificial offerings is sweeping the nation, with sky-high prices for everything from paper castles to yachts and Apple products. Their price tags range from several hundreds to dozens of thousands of yuan per piece.

"Fake money for burning, paper gold ingots and cigarettes are out of fashion. On the other hand, there are many modern high-end products which sell well both in my shop and online store," says a Nanning funeral products retailer surnamed Huang.

Huang's store stocks over 50 kinds of offerings, including fake property ownership certificates, famous-brand watches and even large castles -- a 20,000-yuan item which many customers have reserved in advance.

Huang's online consumers are scattered across several provinces and regions.

Wei Jiankang, a 52-year-old high school teacher, paid a similar business about 1,000 yuan for a paper iPhone, car and computer to mourn his deceased parents in the Qinglonggang Cemetery in the suburbs of Nanning.

"They bore hardships to bring us up but passed away quite early. My dad never dreamed of driving a car or using a mobile phone," he says, adding that he now wants to gift them such privileges posthumously.

Being a grandfather himself, Wei took his family on the drive from Guilin City to his hometown village near Nanning, where he will burn the sacrifices.

"I felt so much regret that I could not offer them a better life. Though living frugally myself, I bought these things without hesitation upon the store owner's recommendation," says Wei.

In fact, the cost price of a paper mobile phone is only 0.5 yuan and a paper sports car about 1.5 yuan, according to a funeral products workshop owner surnamed Wei in Xitang District of Nanning.

Wei says, "The retailers get windfall profits by prompting this blind vying based on people's special emotions and experiences in mourning their loved ones."

Insiders say this trend is tantamount to profiteering from dead people. The craze has prompted producers and retailers of sacrificial merchandise to come up with new products, a drive which causes immeasurable waste and environmental pollution.

China is a nation that pays great respect to filial piety. And the Qingming Festival, in particular, encourage people to remember departed family members, notes Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociology professor with Renmin University.

"Qingming" means purity, peace and civilization in Chinese, adds Zhou, while urging people to profoundly rethink the purpose of this holiday by honoring the dead in more tasteful ways.

Source from xinhuanet