Folklore Analysis Of Painted Coffins In Gansu

Death is the end of individual biological life,the inevitable outcome and destination of life,and the ultimate problem that everyone can’t escape or avoid.The behavior of human facing death and settling the deceased is corresponding to people’s thinking about the occurrence of death,death itself and the relationship between life and death.In order to calmly face death and answer the questions about death,the primitive humans in prehistoric times created the concept of the immortal soul.Based on the concept of the immortal soul and ancestor worship,people created and developed a set of complicated rites for burial of the dead.China is a country that attaches great importance to death.For thousands of years,the Chinese people have been persisting in the traditional concept of death as life.Although many rulers have proposed the idea of simplifying funeral for thousands of years,they have not made the idea of thin and simple funeral become the mainstream concept.Chinese people have been continuing the tradition of heavy burial.Funeral rites have become one of the most solemn and expensive life rituals in China.Making the shrines,preparing the burial vessels,choosing the cemetery and preparing the burial utensils etc,are complicated and costly procedures.The use of funeral tools to bury the dead is one of the important parts of Chinese funeral customs.The development of funeral tools has gone through a long process from scratch,from simple to complex,and in this process,a strict funeral hierarchy system has been formed.Painted coffin as a special burial device in Gansu Province.It is made of official clothes in the Ming and Qing Dynasties and painted with different patterns according to the sex,age and status of the deceased.It involves ceremonies such as warming materials and sweeping materials in the making,preservation and use of the painted coffin.Painted coffins not only express the blessing and mourning of the living for the dead,but also represent the romantic imagination and construction of the people’s residence after death.As a special regional culture,the painted coffin relates to the concept,belief and ritual of the people of Gansu to death.Its emergence and development not only contain the accumulation of the ancient primitive people’s culture,but also absorb the later generations and foreign cultural factors in the continuous evolution.It not only maintains the concept and cultural tradition of the Han nationality that values life and death,respects education,and is civilized and righteous,but also interacts with the culture of other nations and countries.At the same time,under the premise of common cultural tradition and psychological appeal,there is interaction between upper culture and folk culture.Based on the painted coffin as the main research object,by practical fieldwork such as participant observation,in-depth interview and obtain materials and local literature as the main data sources,combined with local politics,economy,history,social and cultural background and public opinion,Painted coffin for research and analysis,from many bearings and angles,and widely sought to illustrate painted coffin is not only a practical buried,is a kind of folk ritual of ornamental value,but also a contains the rich cultural meaning and function of custom products.It not only expresses the living to the dead on the shore of the world’s best wishes,in the process of production and use of painted coffin,manifests the Chinese for thousands of years of traditional death like raw ideas and heavy buried thick undertaker of etiquette system,and in the interaction of the living with the real world,Painted coffin affinity as a status symbol in rural society and maintain the important carrier and plays a very important role,the outline of the traditional Chinese rural society of identity construction and relative rich appearance.