How to send hats, shoes, and iPads to your great-grandparents! This is a Chinese afterlife market~

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]Today I am wandering through a market for the deceased.

[00:00:04]There are more clothes for ancestors here than there are clothes for actual living people.

[00:00:25]Hello from the middle of nowhere. I'm Catherine, an American living in China, and I'm currently on a bike tour across North China with my husband, Asadon. In today's vlog, we're making our way from Ganu Province to one of China's most obscure regions, Ninga. We'll watch the landscape transform from a river valley dotted with temples and shrines to mountain village roads with mosques and pine forests. From interesting funeral customs to local snacks, from unique architecture to encounters with the locals.

[00:00:53]>> Thank you.

[00:00:54]>> Thank you. Thank you.

[00:00:56]>> This was one of the most fascinating sections of our bike tour yet, and we hope you'll be joining us.

[00:01:06][music] >> [music] >> That's good.

[00:01:39]>> [laughter] [laughter] >> This is life every day along our journey. Being the first American and sometimes even the first weer seen by villagers who are so confused how we possibly ended up here. [music] But actually it's pretty simple. Almost a decade into living in China, I've already seen most of the major tourist spots. But my desire to travel and explore is still unsatiated. So I just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into random unknown places. And that's what brought me here.

[00:02:10][music] [music] >> Not having any famous tourist sites doesn't necessarily mean a place isn't interesting. [music] It just means there might be less restaurants, there might be less hotels, there might be less fancy infrastructure, but sometimes you get entire cool things all to yourself.

[00:02:29]Where there are caves, people will carve Buddhas [music] and Buddha adjacent items in the caves.

[00:02:40][music] The indoor ones are very well preserved.

[00:02:51]They're safe from light, wind, water, everything else. But the outdoor ones kind of look like a mummy. like they're barely recognizable as what they once were and they'll probably just be completely worn down to nothing in another few hundred years. This guy, for example, no idea what this is, but it's still cool. This is actually just one of about 40 different Buddha grotto in this region. [music] The landscape is so full of tiny caves that it is perfect for carving Buddhas in.

[00:03:18]And just a few kilometers down the road from here is the tiny city of [music] Ching Chuan, which is where we'll be staying tonight.

[00:03:38]The sun is setting. Now it is time for a small city nightife tour. Let's see what's going on on a Monday night.

[00:04:03]>> [screaming] >> Thank you for this team.

[00:04:22]>> [laughter] [music] [music] >> As usual, the night life was not disappointing. Not only was there a lot going on, there were also tons of nice places to walk, but even more interesting was the market I encountered the next morning. It's definitely a strange site [music] at first glance. A market that is completely filled with objects made out of paper. Actually, all these objects are physical representations of things that people want to send their ancestors in the afterlife. Knockoff money, like we saw in the previous vlog, is the most common one, but there are so many other things available at this market.

[00:05:12]>> It is not enough to burn money for the ancestors anymore. You got to make sure they look good. They got a nice house.

[00:05:18]They got a nice car. They got a massage chair. The Chinese funeral industry is always surprising me. Every time I think that I've seen all the things you could possibly burn for your ancestors, some new thing comes out on the market.

[00:05:39]Hey, okay.

[00:06:02][laughter] Power.

[00:06:28]>> If you can't afford one of those really cool house looking tombstones, they've even got you covered here. You can get a cardboard one to at least show the ancestors. Yeah, money's kind of tight right now. We can't be dropping thousands on a tombstone, but we're thinking of you.

[00:06:42]>> Of course, there's some stuff for living people here, too, like vegetables.

[00:07:16]But if you feel overwhelmed by all the things that you're supposed to buy for the ancestors, worry not. There is a cheat code.

[00:07:54]If you don't want to buy all the things, you can just buy the whole grocery store. After perusing the ancestor market, it was time to head to our next destination. Today we have a 75 kilometer ride ahead of us, but it's all flat. So, actually, it's fine. For once, we are not spending our day going in and out of ravines.

[00:08:24]I thought we were done with funerals after leaving that market. But just a few minutes into our bike ride, we heard some very familiar music.

[00:08:43]>> [music] [music] [music] >> If you didn't know any better, you'd really think this is some kind of party.

[00:09:01]Everything is [music] so colorful and so ornate. It just feels like it's some sort of happy celebration, but it's a funeral. Although depending on the age of the person, sometimes a funeral can be a somewhat happy occasion because you're celebrating that this person got to live for that long. [music] Foreign [singing] [music] speech. Foreign foreign foreign speech.

[00:09:38][music] [singing] Oh.

[00:09:51]Oh. [singing] Oh.

[00:10:05][music] >> [music] >> lots of interesting things happening today, folks. [music] [music] Second funeral of the day, I think.

[00:10:39]Buckle, I've never seen this exact custom before, but guys in white almost always means funeral or something funeral adjacent because a funeral is not a oneanddone thing. There are customs like the annual tomb sweeping day and burning money for the ancestors on the spring festival. In some regions, the 3-year anniversary of someone's death is commemorated with a funeral-like event. There are probably all sorts of customs throughout the country that I'm not even familiar with because there's so much regional variation.

[00:11:03]>> [music] [music] >> In the US, one might visit the gravestone of a parent or grandparent and leave flowers. But overall, I think the custom of commemorating one's ancestors, especially far back ancestors, is much more deeply rooted in society here. Not only did we encounter some interesting rituals on this day, we also passed by so much cool architecture. I lost count of how many temples and shrines we saw.

[00:11:51]Mommy. Ew.

[00:11:57]See that?

[00:12:26]>> [music] [music] >> Oh yeah.

[00:12:49]Your dollar After the previous days of biking in and out of ravines all day long, today's route seemed so easy. It was as though we were riding a motor scooter. 75 km later, we reached Pingyang before sunset.

[00:13:16]This is Pinglang, the last stop before we enter [music] Ninga.

[00:13:29]Wow.

[00:13:31]Very nice. The trash cans here are actually hidden under the ground to maximize the aesthetic value of the sidewalk.

[00:13:42]Dinner was fried flat noodles and this tomato soup full of another noodle that looks kind of like a grub actually, but it [music] was really good. And the next morning, it was finally time to head to Ninga.

[00:14:06]Little did we know this grandpa would be the last person we interacted with for the upcoming 4ish hours because we spent most of the day getting over the mountain that separates [music] Pingyong from its neighbor. There are no villages up there so there weren't many people but the scenery was fantastic.

[00:14:21][music] Wide awake in a spell.

[00:14:31]Smoking like [music] a signal in a dream.

[00:14:37][music] Silver dollar sinking down and dizzy lightness in between.

[00:14:50]I found [music] you just like an open window.

[00:14:56]>> [music] >> Peak spring scenery right now. A bunch of people are in this valley taking photos with the blossoms. Hello. What's up?

[00:15:10]>> Finally reached Ninga. Southern Ninga is heavily populated by the Hoy people, a Muslim ethnic group. So, we'll be seeing a lot of mosques around here. They might look similar to Pingleon's Buddhist temples at a glance, but they have more glass and columns and are usually in a more central and easily accessible location. While Buddhist temples prioritize locations with good fune, like being on the side of a mountain goth chickens, look at this fluffy [music] boy.

[00:15:49]I'm sure [music] [music] you do.

[00:16:28]Thank you.

[00:16:30]Thank you.

[00:16:32]>> Thank you. [screaming] First night in Nisha. We are staying in this village at the foot of the mountain.

[00:17:05]This is our room. We got a nice view out the window. Love these tile roofs with the little critters on them. Cute little thingy on the wall.

[00:17:15]And this adorable coat rack TV couch that we covered in stuff in like 5 seconds. It do be like that, huh?

[00:17:30]>> Look how cute this place is. We're staying in this adorable little village.

[00:17:36]So, this part of the village has a bunch of these cute rural inns in it because people will come from the city to this place, especially during the summer to escape from the noise and the hustle bustle and traffic and just appreciate the silence and beautiful scenery of rural Ninga.

[00:17:53]>> Here is a charging port for an electric car. It's the slow charge, like the one you just plug into a wall, but if you're staying here overnight, it doesn't really matter. Just let your car charge slowly throughout the night. And now we're gonna go wander in the village.

[00:18:29]This is one of Asadon's beloved childhood memories. I've never even seen this thing before.

[00:18:35]It reminds me of a block of styrofoam.

[00:18:37]Let's give it a try. Sweet. Kind of sticky. It's pretty good, but it also just feels like you're eating a block of styrofoam. You know, you just can't get that association out of your head.

[00:18:51]All right, now it's time to try whatever the heck this is.

[00:19:02]>> So, if you've ever had a latch before, that's basically what this is. Like teeny little strings.

[00:19:08]Wow. He is wolfing that thing down. It's not bad. I just wish they would choose sweet or salty and just stick with it instead of making it like this weird mixture.

[00:19:22]He didn't save me a single scrap. He devoured this thing so fast. I knew I heard a sheep in here somewhere.

[00:19:35][bell] This is another latte, but it's in a sheet form instead of like a strip.

[00:19:42]Spicy, salty, oily, the ultimate classic Chinese unhealthy snack. The flavor is five stars. So, I'm going to steal the rest of this one.

[00:20:14]Breakfast time. We got meat and pepper thingy. What looks to be >> cabbage.

[00:20:29]>> And the star of the show is definitely the crispy braids. Look at these.

[00:20:35]His favorite crispy braids.

[00:21:01]>> [music] >> Is John [music] is befriending village grandpas around every single corner.

[00:21:24]Yep. No matter where we are in the country, this is always one of our most frequently received comments. [music] I guess it is a bit unusual to marry a guy whose hometown is about as far away from yours as physically possible. But I'm just glad I found someone who shares my curiosity and passion for exploring. And in the next vlog, we will continue to explore and we'll head deeper into South Na. From city [music] life to more quiet villages, even to the top of a mountain, there are lots more interesting things awaiting us in Ninga. [music]