This is why we rule the world

[khaosworks]

Swear to God I'm not making this up.

For the (dead) Chinese man who has everything: cars and Viagra
By Richard Spencer in Beijing
Last Updated: 3:40am GMT 22/03/2007

At Wang Sufang's shop on the outskirts of Beijing, you can buy a red Mercedes, a two-storey modern villa and a small horse, all for less than £40.

The only catch is that to enjoy them, you have to be dead.

The luxuries that Miss Wang sells are paper versions, traditionally burnt by Chinese as offerings to the dead in the hope that their presence will ease the travails of the afterlife.

In the old days, all that the dead could hope for was paper "heaven money", or perhaps a bit of food. But with economic growth, variety and quality are matching the ambitions of China's new rich.

Now the offerings are getting out of hand, with one "graveyard shop" in the city of Nanjing selling paper Viagra, newspapers reported this week amid calls for the authorities to take action.

"The people who make this stuff are definitely lacking in taste and civilisation," the Nanjing Morning News reported local people as saying.

Burial rituals go back a long way in China, with the terracotta warriors only the most spectacular of a history of accompaniments for the dead.

Burning flowers and paper money, and more elaborate gifts, is a popular folk tradition that survived even the Maoist era's dislike of "feudal beliefs".

Nevertheless, it has never come fully back into the open. Apart from areas around graveyards, shops often cluster in unfashionable outskirts of cities, like Miss Wang's shop in south-west Beijing. What is on sale is normally indicated by a paper wreath in the windows, while staff are reluctant to discuss their business.

Last year, China's deputy minister for civil affairs, Dou Yupei, said he intended to ban at least the more extreme forms.

If he got anywhere, it was not as far as Nanjing, a former capital west of Shanghai. The Morning News reporters, on a tour of the city in advance of the Grave-Sweeping Festival next month, found paper laptop computers and mobile phones, credit cards, travellers' cheques and passports.

But money is nothing without life's - and death's - little pleasures. "At one suburban graveyard they found call girls, condoms and Viagra."

And that's not all. Ten or fifteen years ago when I still paid attention to such things, I spotted the mentioned paper credit cards, paper mobile phones, but what went beyond awesome was when I saw even A FREAKING PAPER SPACE SHUTTLE I SHIT YOU NOT. Seriously, anything you want to carry with you into the afterlife (which, I am told, is apparently just like China, except with no lights), you just burn. Literally millions — or more likely billyuns and billyuns — of hell notes are sent down to the underworld every year, which has always led me to think that Hell must have one, um, heck of an inflation problem.

The burning of paper mansions also brings to mind my family ghost story, but I'll save that for another time.

Comments

[nighthellcat.livejournal.com]

If someone burned me a credit card, I wouldn't use it. I refuse to be in debt now or in my afterlife. thankyouverymuch.

Damn, why a credit card? Everything else I get, but just buy them money instead. Bastard credit cards.

No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask? =)

[radiofreerlyeh.livejournal.com]

Strangely, I saw a Thai or maybe HK horror/action movie that incorporated this idea. The hero's partner was a dead cop, and was equipping by buying and burning paper objects. Burn a paper effigy, get a ghostly .357. (Yes, that was one of the scenes)

[madfilkentist]

Viagra? Are they trying to raise the dead? (If anyone asks, I didn't say that.)

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

I'm familiar with the paper offerings custom, and I was aware that modern luxuries were being offered, but I do agree that Viagra is going a bit too far.

OTOH, maybe with the cell phones and laptops we'll eventually find out what was in the works lost in the Burning of the Books.

[misshallelujah.livejournal.com]

I've seen paper cellphones and laptops, but the paper Viagra really takes the cake. Do the dead even have any NEED for Viagra?!

Geez.