{"id":70,"date":"2017-02-04T14:11:03","date_gmt":"2017-02-04T06:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/2017\/02\/04\/chinese-e-merchants-make-their-living-by-honouring-your-dead\/"},"modified":"2017-02-04T14:11:03","modified_gmt":"2017-02-04T06:11:03","slug":"chinese-e-merchants-make-their-living-by-honouring-your-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/chinese-e-merchants-make-their-living-by-honouring-your-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese E-Merchants Make Their Living By Honouring Your Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese E-Merchants Make Their Living By Honouring Your Dead<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Young Chinese e-merchants have been making money by offering substitute relatives or friends to sweep tombs ahead of the Ching Ming Festival, according to a local news website.<\/p>\n

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Photo: K618<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Ching Ming, or grave-sweeping festival, is an important Chinese tradition where families remember and honour their ancestors or other deceased beloved ones at their grave sites, Huanqiu.com reported.<\/p>\n

Young and old pray before the ancestors, sweep their tombs and offer food, tea, wine, chopsticks, joss paper or libations to the ancestors. Families often have a picnic of the offerings at the tomb.<\/p>\n

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Photo:Sun0769<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

People normally sweep tombs themselves, but for those who are busy with work or far from home they can find someone to sweep the tomb on their behalf via Taobao, a mainland online retailing site<\/p>\n

similar to eBay and Amazon, which provides products and services.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not consider substituting others to honour their beloved ones a \u2018business\u2019. It\u2019s just helping others who cannot express their condolences and achieve their wishes,\u201d said Qiao Luonan, who has been offering the service on Taobao for several years. The report did not mention where he operates.<\/p>\n

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Photo:iqilu<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

For a 15-minute remembrance ritual, Qiao usually prepares for three days because he has to customise his service to every client.<\/p>\n

He needs to know beforehand the location of the tomb, buy things and design a unique procedure tailored to the deceased relatives or friends.<\/p>\n

Locating the tomb, especially old tombs in the wild, is very difficult \u2013 even the relatives often do not know the exact location, Qiao said.<\/p>\n

Qiao broadcasts his remembrance ritual on a live-streaming channel, where clients can view Qiao\u2019s words and actions.<\/p>\n

The highest fee Qiao received from this service was 800 yuan (US$116).<\/p>\n

However, substituting others to sweep tombs is not a lucrative business.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not a thriving business, because most people still want to honour the dead by themselves,\u201d said Little Ke, another e-merchant offering a similar service on Taobao.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t count on this to earn big money, but I will keep providing the service online,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chinese E-Merchants Make Their Living By Honouring Your Dead Young Chinese e-merchants have been making money by offering substitute relatives or friends to sweep tombs ahead of the Ching Ming …","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hiredchina.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}