Text:

“When my family members pass away, we have a funeral ritual. When my grandmother passed away, the coffin was first placed on the ground floor of the apartment building. Before carrying her to the funeral parlor, my father had to break a porcelain bowl on the floor and say something he wanted to say to her — usually something short, like ‘may you go peacefully.’ Then the coffin was carried to the funeral parlor.”

Context:

This text was collected from a Chinese international student from Beijing. She recounted the ritual from personal memory, having witnessed it during her grandmother’s funeral. The practice involves two distinct symbolic acts performed before the deceased is transported to the funeral parlor: the placement of the coffin on the ground floor of the family’s apartment building, and the breaking of a porcelain bowl by the closest male family member — in this case, her father — accompanied by a brief farewell address to the deceased. The phrase her father used, “一路走好” (yī lù zǒu hǎo), translates roughly to “may you go peacefully” or “have a safe journey,” a common Chinese expression of farewell to the dead. The informant presented the ritual as standard family practice rather than something unique to her household, suggesting it reflects broader Beijing or northern Chinese funeral customs transmitted through family participation rather than any formal or institutional instruction.

Analysis:

This piece is a customary ritual operating at the intersection of material culture and folk belief, and it demonstrates Van Gennep’s rites of passage framework. The funeral ritual stages the deceased’s transition out of the living world through two carefully sequenced symbolic acts. The breaking of the porcelain bowl follows the logic of sympathetic magic, more specifically the contagious variety, where the destruction of a physical object in the shared space of the living enacts a spiritual severance, which could formally close the bond between the deceased and the household. The ground floor placement of the coffin before departure further emphasizes this threshold symbolism, positioning the body literally between the domestic space of the living and the outside world before the final transition to the funeral parlor. The father’s spoken farewell, “may you go peacefully,” functions as folk speech with ritual authority, a fixed phrase whose repetition across generations gives it vernacular power.