Guides · Mourning · 15 min read · Updated September 2026

The house in mourning

The tradition that began with graves had a rule for the house a death happened in, and the household kept it for a year. The white affairs against the red; the hall set for the wake, the coffin on the axis and the soul seat before it; the seven sevens, the hundredth day and the three years, with what the household did at each and did not do between; the geomancer’s two visits; what the rules kept a bereaved household from doing to its house, and what the stress research says they were right about.

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Metal

Fig. 01 White flowers by a window. The tradition turned the house white for a year and red again after it, and the year had a calendar.

The life in the house path on this site begins with a baby’s room and this guide is its last page, because the tradition that began by siting graves had a rule for the house a death happened in, and the household kept it for a year. A death turned the house white: the red came down from the gate, the hall was set for the wake with the coffin on its axis, the household counted seven weeks in sevens and then a hundred days and then three years, and for the whole of the first year it did not marry, feast, move or build. This guide gives the white affairs as the households kept them, the hall as it was set, the calendar with what was done at each date and refused between, the geomancer’s two visits, and what the stress research, which knows nothing of the rite, says the year of not moving was for.

The white affairs

The Chinese household sorted its great events by colour: the red affairs, a wedding, a birth, a New Year, and the white affairs, bai shi, a death and its rites, and the colour was the rule. On the day of a death the red came down: the couplets either side of the gate were papered over in white, the red lanterns replaced with white or blue, the door gods covered, and a white cloth or a strip of paper hung at the gate to tell the lane; Knapp records the gate in mourning across the provinces and de Groot described the Fujian version in the 1880s in a detail nobody has needed to repeat. Inside, the household went into white and hemp by its grades, the five grades of mourning the Confucian rite fixed by the relation to the dead, the sons in unhemmed sackcloth and the distant cousins in a white band, and Ebrey’s translation of Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals gives the grades and the sequence the household then followed, which is the sequence the essays in Watson and Rawski find kept, with local turns, from the Song to Hong Kong. The house in mourning was a house the tradition read differently for a year: a household in white did not paste red couplets at the New Year but white or blue ones, did not visit its neighbours’ celebrations, did not hold its own, and, the rule this site’s other guides keep meeting, did not move, build or dig. Feuchtwang reads the white year as the household’s withdrawal from the imperial metaphor of its gods, who are covered on the altar so as not to see the death; the household gods essay gives the gods and the year essay the calendar the mourning is cut out of.

Tradition · The geomancer’s two visits

A death brought the geomancer twice. The first visit was the one the tradition was founded for, the choosing of the grave, which the yin house essay gives from the Book of Burial onward and which Zhu Xi’s rite made a duty: the site walked, the vein read, the lair found, the day chosen from the almanac for the burial and for the return. The second was the house’s. After the burial the master was asked to read the house the death had happened in, to say whether it had a fault that had killed and whether it was now a house with a history, the selling guide’s inauspicious house, and to fix the days on which the household could resume the things it had stopped. The two visits are the two halves of the practice, the dead and the living, and Freedman’s lineages paid for both.

Fig. 01 The five grades of mourning, the wufu, which the Confucian rite fixed and Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals transmitted to every household that kept the rite from the Song onward. The grade is a cloth, a term and a degree of kinship, and the three move together: the closer the dead, the coarser the hemp and the longer it is worn. The first grade is unhemmed sackcloth with its edges left ragged, worn three years by a son for his father, which is the heaviest obligation the tradition knows and the one that took officials out of office to serve it. The second is the same sackcloth with its edges sewn, worn a year for grandparents, brothers and a son, and in shorter terms of five and three months for the generations above that. The third is a coarse but worked hemp for nine months, the grade of first cousins. The fourth is finer, five months, for second cousins and great-uncles. The fifth is the finest hemp for three months, and it reaches to third cousins, which is to say to everyone descended from one great-great-grandfather. That reach is the definition of a lineage: the mourning grades drew the family the tradition’s other rites then treat as a unit, and the household in white is that whole body, not the household in the house. Ebrey 1991 for Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals and the grades; Watson and Rawski 1988 for how the rite was kept in practice from the Song to Hong Kong; de Groot 1897 for the Fujian observances of the 1880s. Terms are the standard ones and were varied by lineage and by dynasty; the drawing simplifies a body of ritual law that fills chapters.

The grades are worth drawing because they decide who the household in white is. A grade is a cloth, a term and a degree of kinship, and the three move together: the coarser the hemp, the longer it is worn and the closer the dead. The first is unhemmed sackcloth with the edges left ragged, three years for a father, and it took officials out of office to serve it. The fifth is the finest hemp for three months, and it reaches to third cousins, which is to say to every descendant of one great-great-grandfather. That last reach is the tradition’s definition of a family: the mourning drew the body that the yin house essay then finds sharing a grave hill and the household gods essay finds sharing a tablet. When this page says a house is in mourning, the house is the smallest part of what is meant.

The hall set for the wake

1The coffin on the axis, head to the interior · 2 The soul seat, portrait, incense, white candles
3The sons, east · 4 The women of the house, west · 5 The ancestral altar, the gods covered
6White lanterns at the gate · 7 The door gods and couplets papered white

Plan 02 The hall set for a wake The principal hall of a courtyard house set for a death, as the households of the late imperial period set it and the ethnographies of Hong Kong and Taiwan still find it. The coffin lies on the axis of the hall with its head to the interior and its feet toward the door, so that the dead lie as the elders sat, facing south down the axis to the gate. Before it stands the soul seat, a table with the portrait or the paper tablet, the incense burner, the white candles and the offerings, which is the altar of the household turned for a week toward one person. The sons kneel on the east side of the hall and the women of the house on the west, by the rank the funeral manuals give, and the visitors bow from the axis. On the back wall the ancestral altar keeps its place, and the gods on it are covered with red paper so that they do not see the death, which is the southern practice; the door gods and the couplets on the gate are papered white, the red lanterns replaced with white, and the gate stands open for the visitors. The hall is the house’s bright hall, and the tradition gave the dead the position it gave the living for a week.

The wake was held in the principal hall, and the drawing above gives the hall as the households of the late imperial period set it and the ethnographies of Hong Kong and Taiwan still find it. The coffin lies on the axis of the hall with its head to the interior and its feet toward the door, so that the dead lie as the elders sat, facing south down the axis to the gate; it is the command position given to the dead for a week, and the houses essay’s courtyard house used for the purpose its axis was built for. Before the coffin stands the soul seat, ling zuo, a table with the portrait or the paper tablet, the incense burner, the white candles and the offerings of food, and the household’s altar is turned for the week toward one person; the sons kneel on the east side and the women of the house on the west, by the rank the funeral manuals give, and the visitors bow from the axis with the gate open behind them. On the back wall the ancestral altar keeps its place, and in the south the gods on it are covered with red paper so that they do not see the death, and the mirror in the hall, if there is one, is turned or covered, which is the tradition’s rule about mirrors and the dead that the mirrors guide gives its reasons. The hall is the house’s bright hall, and the tradition gave it to the dead exactly as it gave it to the living: on the axis, facing the light, with the household on either side and the gate open in front.

The calendar

Fig. 03 The household’s calendar after a death, on one line broken in two, the first hundred days at one scale and the years after at another. Above the line, what the household does: the hall set and the gate hung white on the day; the rites every seventh day for seven weeks, the seven sevens, a Buddhist count the households kept whatever else they believed; the soul seat taken down on the seventh seven; the tablet carried to the ancestral altar on the hundredth day; the grave visited and the rite held on the first anniversary; and the end of the formal mourning for a parent at twenty-seven months, the three years of the Confucian rite as the Family Rituals count them. Below the line, what the household does not do: no red at the gate for the year, no couplets and no red lanterns at the New Year, white or blue ones in their place; no wedding in the house and no feast; and no move, no building and no digging, the house left as it was until the mourning is out. The last of these is the one the site’s other guides keep meeting: a household in mourning does not move house, and the tradition and the stress research agree on the reason. The sequence is Ebrey’s Family Rituals and the essays in Watson and Rawski; the grades of mourning and their lengths varied by the relation and the region, and twenty-seven months is the parent’s. The seven sevens and the hundredth day are the household calendar of the south to this day.

The mourning had a calendar, and the drawing above gives it on one line broken in two, the first hundred days at one scale and the years at another. The rites were held every seventh day for seven weeks, the seven sevens, qi qi, a Buddhist count the households kept whatever else they believed, with the soul seat taken down on the forty-ninth day; the tablet went to the ancestral altar on the hundredth day, which is when the dead became an ancestor and the household gods essay’s shelf gained a name; the grave was visited and the rite held on the first anniversary and at Qingming every spring after, which the year essay gives; and the formal mourning for a parent ended at twenty-seven months, the three years of the Confucian rite as the Family Rituals count them, when the household put on colour again and pasted red at the next New Year. Between the dates the household refrained, and the refraining is the part of the rite that concerns a house. No red at the gate for the year and no red couplets at the New Year; no wedding held in the house, no feast given and no feast attended; and no move, no building and no digging, the house left as it was until the mourning was out, which the almanac enforced by giving a household in mourning no day for entering a house or settling a bed, and which the moving guide meets from the other side. Bruun’s villages kept the calendar through the years when the rite was banned, in the house rather than at the grave, and Emmons found the Hong Kong households of the 1990s keeping the sevens and the hundredth day and letting the rest go, which is the shape of the rite in the city now: the counting kept, the white kept for the weeks, and the year of not moving kept by the households that can afford to.

Evidence · The year of not moving

The one rule of the white year the research has something to say about is the last one. Holmes and Rahe’s scale of 1967, which the moving guide cites, ranks the changes of a life by the adjustment they demand and puts the death of a spouse at the top of the scale, at a hundred, with a change of residence at twenty and a change in living conditions at twenty-five, and the scale’s use in the decades since has been to show that the changes add: a household that moves house in the year it buries someone has stacked the two largest and smallest events on its list and the research finds the stacking in illness the following year. The tradition’s rule was the reverse of an addition. It kept the bereaved household in the house it knew, with the bed where it was and the gate the same colour, for a year, and the site records the rule as the tradition’s and the reason as the research’s.

Misconception · A death makes the house bad

The paperbacks read a death in the house as a stain on it, to be cured with salt, sage and a practitioner, and the market, as the selling guide gives, prices a flat where someone died by violence at a fifth less. The tradition read a death in the house as ordinary, because it was: the elders died in the hall they had sat in, the coffin lay on its axis, and the house that had been the dead’s was the ancestors’ afterwards and the better for it, which is why the tablet went to the altar in the same room. The inauspicious house of the manuals is the house of a violent or a self-inflicted death, and it is inauspicious because of what happened and not because of where. A household that has buried someone in the ordinary way lives in a house with a history, which the tradition called a good house.

The house in mourning, in order

The gate goes white. The red couplets papered, the lanterns changed, a cloth at the gate; the lane told without a word.
The hall set. The coffin or the portrait on the axis facing the door, the soul seat before it, the household either side, the gods on the altar covered.
The sevens counted. A rite every seventh day for seven weeks; the soul seat taken down on the forty-ninth.
The hundredth day. The tablet to the ancestral shelf, at the height the household gods essay gives; the dead an ancestor.
The year kept. No red, no wedding, no feast; and no move, no building, no digging, the house left as it was.
The grave visited. The first anniversary, and Qingming every spring after; the geomancer’s first visit made permanent.
The colour back. Red at the gate at the New Year after the mourning is out; the house read again as a house with a history, which is a good one.