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activities Qingming is well correlated in time with the important phase of sowing in the annual agricultural cycle.
The Dongting basin in Hubei and Hunan is regarded as a single crop area. Only one gazetteer mentions a different arrangement; this is the 1872 edition of Baling xian zhi which states:
the first crop of paddy is sown at the second halfmoon. In the third moon it is transplanted. In the sixth moon it is reaped. The late crop of paddy is sown in the middle of the third moon. In the fourth moon it is transplanted. In the seventh moon it is reaped.7
In this case the two crops were not successive ones. Apparently the same seedbeds were used. The two rounds of seedlings were transplanted to two different sets of fields, or otherwise the peasants must have practiced a scheme of intercropping. There is a possibility that either arrangement was a response to a situation characterized by a lack of labour at peak seasons; to spread the sowing in time would ease the 'bottlenecks' in rice production, the intensive work periods at transplantation and harvest. In this Baling case the late crop seems to correspond to the main rice production cycle of the Dongting area. To the extent that double cropping existed in the middle Yangzi basin, it was a late introduction, probably not earlier than the Sung dynasty.8
Before the sowing, the seedbeds are carefully cleaned and fertilized; water is conducted to flood the beds and the grain grows in mud. The earlier shoots are protected from low night temperatures by the cover of water. In sunny weather the beds are drained to allow the grain to root and grow faster. Qingming falls into this first phase of the rice cycle. On the basis of this circumstance we may take it as a part of our hypothesis that there is a positive semantic relationship between Qingming and sowing.
The essay elaborates further some very general propositions on the Chinese calendrical system I offered some years ago.9 I suggested that one dominant principle in the structure regulating the annual events embedded a notion of social exchange. Visits and return visits are important acts of social ceremonialism all over China. This is especially so during the lunar New Year. Again, the New Year rites told about the visit of the dead ancestors to their living progeny. The ancestors made a similar visit during the Duanwu festival in the fifth moon. Their appearance on this occasion