When you first start up the street the cemetery is on you find booths like this all along the road out side the cemetery gates. This is where you buy the paper goods to burn at the grave site so your loved ones can have these things in the afterlife. That's right, you can buy paper flowers, clothes, money, cigarettes, alcohol, mahajong, decks of cards, watches, cell phones, cars, houses, TVs, you name it they probably have a paper version of it to burn. 
This man runs one of the roadside booths. He is making paper shoes to go with the paper clothes. When a local person was asked how often these things must be purchased they said that a devoted relative should buy clothes twice a year and other items more but that once a year or less was what often happens. 
Here is an example of a cardboard house that you could buy to burn. This one was very Asian style but they also had western styled ones. Whatever you could not afford in real life you can have in the afterlife if your only child is lovingly devoted to ancestor worship.
Behind the booths are little shops and shanties where the people who sell these paper goods live and work making them. Their entire livelihood is death and cultural customs.
Here are some pictures of what inside the cemetery looks like.
This is a very small picture of the thousands upon thousands that are buried here. It is the largest cemetery in town and it is for a city that is now 2.5 million.
The ones with red stars mark the communist party members.
The most encouraging thing to see in the midst of the rows and rows of ones who have already met their maker is a small red cross. Every now and then you would spot one letting you know that a Christian was buried there.
The ones with the oddly shaped red crosses represent Russian Orthodox.
Here on the end you can see one of the pits next to the row that are for burning the offerings. 
The bottom of the grave stones are often shaped like a small alter where things like food and inscence can be laid. They are often guarded by lions.
The city is always in the background.
The grave markings are similar to ours in America. They sometimes have a picture and they tell the name of who is buried there along with their status (mother, daughter, etc.) and the year of their birth and death. 
Apparently it is popular to buy little evergreen trees and put them next to the grave because they stay green and represent eternity. Similar in some ways to Christmas trees.
Here is one instance where someone has come and laid food for their ancestor's spirit to eat. 
After walking through the maze of graves and pathways on top of the hill you come to the other side and can look out at all the new terracing they are building on other hillsides to make way for thousands of future grave sites. Pagodas dot the hill tops.
The supplies are all waiting for their new occupants.
Here is where we get to my favorite part. If you go down the hill and turn and walk up the ravine further back towards the mountains you begin to see random grave markers pop up among the weeds.
Some aren't in very good shape but if you look up and further back you begin to see several graves scattered back in the hills.
This is where the Christians are buried. There are some red crosses for people who died more recently and had lots of money and sometimes even the position to be able to afford them a little red cross. Others however could not. In fact many of the little red crosses have been added posthumously by family members.
Some of these graves are really old and others newer. 
But everyone one of them has some kind of cross. Some at first only had a make shift wooden cross out of sticks, but then later when money was available family has come back in and erected newer grave markers in front of the wooden crosses.
Some are stone, some are clay, and some are wood. 
It was a really neat experience to traipse through the weeds into this seemingly lost and forgotten part of the cemetery. It was also encouraging to know that even though these have been hidden out of the way there are, and have always been, a 'cloud of witnesses' here. 
