Colloquial Facts to Spur the Ol' Imagination

not_HarryS

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Not quite sure if this is the right forum for this, but I was talking to my taxi driver on the way to work today about death in the Chinese countryside, and he told me some stuff that might be interesting for all the world-builders out there. Chinese people are generally fairly reluctant to talk about death (it's considered a very inauspicious topic here, especially for non-city-folk), so I was pleased to have the opportunity to learn about some of their burial habits :)

Anywho, because there's an insane amount of people here, it's actually illegal not to cremate your dead now in China. There just isn't enough room for all the corpses. Although it's forbidden, they still bury their dead whole in the countryside, however, and I was particularly interested in the way in which they arrange their dead.

Essentially, their dead (at least in my driver's part of China) are arranged in a typical family tree-esque manner. That is, the patriarch of the family is at the front (with his wife buried next to him), and his sons are buried in front of him (with their wives next to them). And each of his son's sons are buried in front of them, etc., kind of like a tree diagram in math.

But ad infinitum. Personally, it sounds like a waste of space, but I thought the idea was interesting, because it's a completely physical manifestation of a traditional family tree, with one exception: unmarried women and infants were thrown into a group tomb and not included in the family burial plot.

Also, to give ya'll a cool bit of mental imagery, old Chinese graveyards generally don't have headstones, and the graves themselves are tumuli, kinda like medieval barrows.

So yeah. That's that. I know this post seems kinda pointless, but I think that this could be a cool thread in which we share random colloquial facts (even if they're just hearsay) to help poke and prod the muses of those who might be struggling for interesting or unique details in their novels.

Anybody else have anything cool to share?
 
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Puma

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I found your post quite interesting - something I didn't know and hadn't really even thought about.

Now I'll have to think of any different customs here to share. Puma