Luke Liu
Wenzhou, China
2025, Senior, Creative Writing

My grandfather used to say the dead needed a proper seat. No fire, no smoke, no cremation. The body must lie whole, buried deep, facing the right direction. He’d murmur, “A good tomb protects the living, and a bad one follows you home.” The chair-shaped stone tombs mattered. It offered the dead a throne and reminded the living who they’d been. In Wenzhou, this belief ran deep. Bodies rarely turned to ash. Instead, the departed remained seated in the stone chair tombs.

But these tombs held more than just bodies. They embodied villagers’ dreams of wealth, prestige, and ancestral blessing, a culture where the Chinese word for tomb ¹棺(guān), sounds like the word for rank ¹官(guān), where filial piety morphs into social expectation, and where grief is carved in stone and length.

I didn’t understand this fully until I saw my uncle return from Shenzhen, stepping out of a car like a general coming home. Squeaky shoes, way too shiny. Collar straight as a ruler. His hair looked like it had been glued in place. He walked like he was proud of something. I didn’t know what. Then, he stood beside his father’s tomb, surveying it as though critiquing a show home. Ivory marble curved into place, dragons wound at its base, and stone lions glowed with polished eyes. He called it honor. I stared at those lions, thinking, how can grief gleam like pride? At twelve, maybe thirteen, I lacked the words, but sensed this was no mourning. It was more like a display.

And he wasn’t the only one. One tomb led to another, then ten, then too many to name. The hillside began to shine with polished stone. Tombs rose like trophies, some so big they blocked the path. Grief became something else. A contest, maybe. Gradually, people competed to build bigger, shinier, heavier. One chair tomb sparked another, each louder than the last. You built because your cousin did. You made it fancier because your neighbor hired a guy from the city to carve lotus curls. The soil hardened with pride. Not building meant you were poor, ungrateful, and disrespectful. Filial piety used to be quiet. Now it needed an audience.

The hills, once soft and alive, sagged under stone. At school, a biology textbook showed forests in decline. Pages were glossy, images too clean, except one. A field of stumps, land raw like severed necks. Outside the window, it wasn’t abstract. The tombs spread. Trees fell. Birds left in silence. One day, my teacher mentioned burying bodies beneath saplings. Let memory root, not rise. I liked that. At dinner, I brought it up, maybe too quickly. My uncle snapped, said we can’t bury the dead like trash. Asked if I’d fold my grandfather into a paper bag. People laughed. I said nothing, then something small, about the damage. The room froze. Chopsticks hung mid-air. My mother stayed quiet but didn’t stop me. Someone muttered that I had no respect. I wondered respect for whom, the dead or the hills still gasping for breath?

It wasn’t just me. Others had noticed this issue too. In a 2018 China Daily report on burial reform, Wenzhou was named one of the hardest-hit areas in the “whitewashed mountain” crisis. Some chair tombs reached ten square meters. In one village in Yueqing County, hundreds filled an entire hillside. Forests were cleared. Hills were leveled. Roots that once held the earth in place were stripped away. In Wenzhou’s steep, rain-heavy terrain, the soil didn’t stand a chance. Without trees, it crumbled. When the storms came, it ran.

And then came August 2019, when hills finally gave in. Typhoon Lekima hit. The wind tore at rooftops like claws. Then came the rain, slamming fast and brutal. Water rushed down the bare slopes, carving paths through tombs. Some tombs behind our village split open. My family and I watched from the window as brown water tore across the land.

When the storm passed, we stepped downstairs slowly. I opened my mouth to ask about the neighbors, then stopped. The persimmon tree next door was barely standing. Something pale hung from its branch. Not fruit. A bone. Thin, white, swaying like a charm no one wanted to claim. The bone just stayed embedded in the tree for days. No one dared touch it. It wasn’t just fear to me. It was heavier than that. Like the mountain had tried to speak but choked.

Later, we heard that in nearby Yueqing County, a landslide caused a natural dam to break. The river rose ten meters in ten minutes. Over a hundred homes were destroyed. One hundred and twenty people were trapped. Most people blamed the damage on the natural disaster. But standing there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we helped cause it. Most people blamed the disaster, called it fate. Some, whose tombs survived, claimed it was ²feng shui, that their ancestors were watching over them and said their chair tombs were meant to shine their family’s name, but all I felt was the cold that seeps under my clothes.

When my great-grandfather died at 94, we didn’t carve a huge tomb or search for ²feng shui. Just the three of us in the wind. My mother held the ginkgo as my father pressed soil around its roots. She whispered, “This is better. This is enough.” Later, my sister came and pressed three folded cranes into the dirt. “Will the tree forget him?” she asked, brushing the soil with her sleeve. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell her no, that trees remember in their own way. The tree stood tall, its leaves gold-tipped, bees humming low around the roots. On the way back to the car, she asked why we hadn’t built a tomb. I said, “The tree’s enough.” She glanced back and nodded.

I didn’t stop at that ginkgo tree. At school, I made posters and taped them near the stairwell. In the village, I planted saplings where tombs had once pressed into the soil. My shoes sank deep into the mud. One afternoon, as I lifted broken tiles into a bucket, an old man walked by. He looked around and said, “Cleaner than before.” I wiped my hands on my shirt and smiled. He nodded and kept walking.

I wrote proposal to Wenzhou Civil Affairs Bureau after seeing pale hills, cracked tombs, and sliding soil. I included what I had read: how in Japan, ashes are buried beneath trees, and in Sweden, cemeteries like Skogskyrkogården fade into the forest. Those images stayed with me.

I suggested something else. Tree burials. Memorial groves. A way to honor the dead without cutting the mountain open.

The city led the way, and I also joined. I planted shrubs with village crews. I moved bricks through mud, took photos for progress logs, and helped rewrite policy notices in local dialects. The restoration spread fast, especially along roads and scenic hills. By April 2022, over two hundred thousand tombs had been reshaped. More than 160,000 white hills were planted with native growth. Around 2,400 acres turned green. People began to speak of grief as something lighter, something the land could carry.

My grandfather once said the dead needed a proper seat. Maybe that seat no longer has to press into the mountain. Maybe the mountain, after all these years, can finally rise.

 

Footnotes
¹ In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “coffin” (棺, guān) is a homophone of “official” (官, guān), which traditionally implies political power or social elevation. This kind of linguistic connection reinforces the cultural belief that a proper burial may bring prosperity to the family.
² feng shui (风水), literally meaning “wind and water,” is a traditional Chinese geomantic system that determines the optimal placement and orientation of tombs, homes, and buildings in harmony with natural forces. In burial customs, good feng shui is believed to bring peace to the dead and fortune to the living.

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Chair Tombs on the Hill: What We Buried, What We Broke