Qingming holiday sees 62 mln tomb sweepers as green burials gain wider acceptance

During the three-day Qingming holiday, a total of 66,300 funeral service institutions nationwide provided on-site memorial services, with approximately 1.15 million staff members involved in service support, according to data released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs on Monday.

Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, falls on April 5 this year. It is a traditional Chinese festival for people to pay tribute to the dead and worship their ancestors.

The public made over 62 million on-site tomb-sweeping visits, and over 14 million vehicles were directed to and from cemeteries.

Among those who visited grave-sites, more than 39 million people, or 63 percent of visitors, chose green and low-carbon memorial methods, such as offering fresh flowers instead of burning incense or paper offerings.

A total of 41,677 sets of cremated remains were interred in various funeral institutions during the holiday.

Among these, 2,184 sets were buried using eco-friendly methods including sea burials, tree burials, and lawn burials; 8,827 sets were placed in columbarium niches; and 23,102 sets were interred in land-saving grave plots.

Eco-friendly and land-saving burials accounted for 81.8 percent of all interments, indicating a significant rise in public acceptance and recognition of such practices.

In recent years, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has guided local authorities to promote changes in funeral and burial customs through measures tailored to local conditions.

To date, all 31 provincial-level regions have issued regulatory norms and advocacy standards for changing funeral customs, and 28 provinces have introduced implementation guidelines for promoting eco-friendly and land-saving burials.

Qingming holiday sees 62 mln tomb sweepers as green burials gain wider acceptance

China's Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwest on Sunday, sending three astronauts to its orbiting space station.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, lifted off from the launch site at 23:08 Beijing Time (15:08 GMT).

The crew members consist of mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, and fellow astronauts Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying, who is also the first astronaut from China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

In another notable first, one of the crew members is set to undertake a year-long stay aboard the space station, double the usual duration of previous Shenzhou missions.

After entering orbit, the Shenzhou-23 spaceship will perform a fast automated rendezvous and docking with the radial port of the space station core module Tianhe, forming a combination of three modules and three spacecraft.

Shenzhou-23 marks the 40th flight of China's manned spaceflight program and the seventh manned flight mission since the Tiangong space station entered its application and development phase in late 2022.

China launches Shenzhou-23 manned spaceship