LIÚ Bāng 刘邦 was the triumphant general who ended years of chaos and successfully established the Hàn 汉 dynasty, and history knows him as its first emperor under the title “great ancestor” or Gāozǔ 高祖 (reign 06b-1).
After his great success, he returned to celebrate at his native village. But it was a bittersweet visit, for his parents were no longer alive to enjoy his success, and indeed in the chaos of the war, no-one remembered any longer which graves were theirs. The emperor sought and sought but was unable to find his parents’ graves.
As the new emperor and his minions were seeking in despair through the cemetery of the village, he noticed some pieces of colored paper floating in the breeze, a local custom for communicating with supernaturals. In a moment of inspiration, he gathered a handful of these papers and threw them into the air, praying that they would reveal the location of his parents’ tomb. Suddenly, they all floated at once to a single grave.
The emperor declared this to be the correct grave, and ordered a large monument erected. Ever since that time when people have cleaned their ancestors’ graves at Qīngmíng, they put bits of paper on top, weighted down by stones, to show that the descendants are filially paying attention to the remains of their ancestors.