China's ancestor day leads Confucian revival

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - China officially marked the traditional Qingming Festival of ancestor worship on Friday in a revival of Confucian ways that some scholars hope will eventually elevate the traditional doctrine into a "state religion."

Chinese for centuries commemorated the day, falling in early April, by sweeping the graves of forebearers and leaving symbolic tributes, an act reflecting Confucius' teachings of loyalty to family and tradition.

After 1949, China's revolutionary Communists, hostile to old ways, let the day pass officially unmarked and dismissed Confucius as a deadening "reactionary" influence.

But the government last year made the Qingming Festival a public holiday when citizens will be encouraged to revive some old practices, as the Communist Party seeks to make traditional virtues an anchor of order during feverish social change.

In cemeteries across China, people marked the first revived Qingming holiday with offerings of flowers, fruit and incense. Trains and buses in Beijing were crowded with residents heading to cemeteries on the city outskirts.

"This should have been done long ago, it's already well overdue," Cui Hengjie, an English-language teacher visiting a family gravestone, said of the revived holiday.

In the northwest province of Shaanxi, senior government officials attended a flamboyant ceremony at the supposed grave site of the mythical "Yellow Emperor", honoured as the first ancestor of all Han Chinese, state television reported.

A crowd of 10,000 bowed to honour the mythical emperor and men in red robes beat drums and bells as a choir trilled.