Commemorative events held across the city for Qingming Festival
Students commemorate martyrs at Shanghai Longhua Martyr Cemetery.
Commemorative events were hosted across the city with the public mourning the deceased amid a "greener" trend for this year's Qingming Festival, or tomb-sweeping day.
The traditional Chinese festival on Thursday was a time for Chinese people to pay tribute to the deceased and worship their ancestors.
At Shanghai Longhua Martyr Cemetery in Xuhui District and a further 76 martyr memorial sites across the city, the public mourned China's fallen revolutionary heroes by bowing, laying flowers and cleaning tombstones.
The cemetery has the graves of more than 1,700 revolutionary martyrs.
During the three-day Qingming Festival holiday, people will also experience traditional Qingming rituals such as kite painting and traditional intangible cultural heritage such as sachet making in Longhua. Peking Opera performances telling the stories of the heroes will also be staged.
Students perform at the commemorative event.
Cherishing history inspires people, a cemetery operator said.
At Haigang Lingyuan Cemetery in the Pudong New Area, people bid farewell to Le Xiuhai, former director of Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who made great contributions to the transformation of scientific achievements in his lifetime. He died last month aged 84.
A statue of Le was unveiled amid lush greenery and tranquility at Sike Garden.
The Sike Garden, jointly established by the Shanghai Association of Senior Science and Technology Workers and the cemetery, commemorates experts and scholars who have made great dedications to Shanghai's scientific and technological development.
Flowers are laid at a commemorative event at Haigang Lingyuan Cemetery.
The Binhai Guyuan Cemetery in Fengxian District boasts the city's only sea burial memorial site.
People planted cherry blossom trees as commemoration as cherry blossoms signify purity and new beginnings.
Families of the deceased hung silk ribbons on the branches, expressing their silent grief for the deceased.
They left their words for their lost ones on letters and dropped the letters into a "paradise mailbox."
"It provides a healing spiritual comfort for us," said a resident surnamed Hu who attended the event. "Trees are permanent, and our love is everlasting."
In Shanghai, sea burials dated back to 1991, making it one of the earliest cities in China to start the eco-friendly practice. So far, the names of more than 70,000 returning to sea have been engraved on a monument on a tomb.
"Last year, the ashes of nearly 8,000 deceased in Shanghai were scattered into the sea, in sharp comparison to 200 in 1991," said Wei Chao, deputy director of Shanghai Funeral and Interment Service Center. "They saved precious land resources for their descendants."
Biodegradable urn burials that require no land is also gaining acceptance, Wei said.
"It was not the option of the majority in Shanghai, but now, about 2,000 picked such an eco-friendly way of burial annually in recent years," Wei said.
People hang silk ribbons on trees at the Binhai Guyuan Cemetery in Fengxian District.
