Lessons to learn as we get to roots of the family tree

When it comes to the rituals surrounding death, we Chinese are worlds apart from Westerners. At a Western funeral, in addition to the tears shed there are likely to be cheery anecdotes and side-splitting jokes; at most Chinese funerals, the Confucian principle of shen zhong zhui yuan holds absolute sway: being thorough and reverent when one pays respects to dead relatives and offers sacrifices to ancestors.

As the annual Tomb Sweeping Day (April 4) approaches, Chinese will be beginning to pay tribute to dead family members, a tradition with a history of about 2,500 years. One notable change in recent years is that people are casting their minds back well before recent generations, over decades and even centuries.

Some will walk through mountain areas where their ancestors were buried long ago, intent on finding tombstones that bear names they have only seen in a family tree or other similar documents. That is what members of my clan, in the hundreds of thousands with the surname Yao, are doing. But they have a lot of catching up to do if they want to bring the family tree up to date because the clan's official family tree was last published 95 years ago.

The first generation were settled along the Maxi Brook in Tongcheng, Anhui province, during the late Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), so this branch of the family is called Maxi Yao. Over the next 600 years or so until 1921 the genealogy was updated eight times. Copies of the genealogy are held in the Chinese National Library, Tokyo National Museum and the Genealogical Society of Salt Lake City. It contains more than 20 volumes and records over 20 generations of the same clan.

I knew little about my family history until I recently heard about plans to bring it up to date. Growing up after the country started to open up and adopt great economic changes, and educated with an understanding of the outside world, I was too preoccupied with my own achievements and looking after my immediate family to be interested in the wider clan.