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GÖRAN AIJMER
At this stage I am not prepared to give a full interpretation of this Liang dynasty rustic calendar. But one thing is quite striking: Qingming is not mentioned, nor is grave worship. Instead we find a ritual period starting at the Equinox, concerned with sowing and marked by the absence of fire in the fields. Then the focus is on the Earth God who receives offerings. People move out of their houses and provide offerings for the ancestors - but how is unclear. At Cold Food the emphasis is shifted to the domestic sphere and to consumption. No fire was lit and cold food was eaten for three days. On the third day of the third moon, finally, people went to the river banks and set afloat small bowls. This may have been some sort of departure ceremony for the ancestors who had received offerings earlier on Earth God Day.
If grave worship was introduced in the area at a somewhat later stage, there was some option as to when the graves should be visited. If we assume that the sweeping and eating on the graves were linked to Qingming, then Cold Food, which falls on the same day, would be of importance; and, indeed, the latter name is frequently mentioned in the sources. But, on the other hand, the customs of Earth God Day were much more in consonance with the idea of grave visits, and in many places it seems as if the concern with the bones of the dead merged with that day of open air celebrations in the second moon. Thus some of the variation may be due to local adaptation to a superimposed standard Chinese system. Then we can accommodate for some variation within a system which has ritualized the sowing of rice and incorporated grave worship as part of this. But some further factors may have been of additional importance. In the first place I am thinking of the introduction of double cropping. This was not common, and it was late. In the seventeenth century only one crop of rice was grown, but in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries great efforts were made by officials to promote the planting of second crops. This meant two sowings, two transplantations, and two harvests in those places which had opted for agricultural innovation. But such new technical arrangements disarranged the traditional semantics of the rice cycle.
As was mentioned earlier in this essay, Baling is the only place from which we have found mention of the adoption of some sort of system with two crops. There sowing took place in the second moon, transplanting in the third, another sowing in the third moon,