Taoist priest honors China's coronavirus dead

Mounted on a rocky hill in China's Shandong province, a quaint Taoist monastery preserves a collection of over 500 bright blue tablets, bearing the names of those who helped battle the spread of the coronavirus, or lost their lives to the pandemic themselves.

That includes Li Wenliang, a young doctor who was mourned across China after he died of the very disease he tried to warn doctors about -- long before it spread around the world.

Taoism, or Daoism, is a philosophy-turned-religion with tens of millions of followers in China, one of the country's five officially sanctioned religions.

Priest Liang Xingyang, who started the memorial at the monastery, says Taoists use tablets to give souls a place to rest after death.

"They're all completely different individuals, so why are their spirits meeting here together? It's because their contribution went beyond any democracy, organisation or even country. Their contribution has played a positive role in the whole world's fight against the virus. That's the real reason we are remembering them."

And as the monastery commemorates the Hungry Ghost Festival, with elaborate ceremonies, and food offerings laid out, many family members of the dead have come to pay their respects.

Falling on the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar, the festival is when spirits of the dead are believed to return to wander the Earth.

Liu Shuqin came to the monastery to mourn her son Liu Hewei, who died at the age of 42, and says the memorial has given her son the sendoff he so deserved:

"We weren't able to do any of this, any of these ceremonies. I thought, this poor child of mine hasn't been blessed. He will be blind and lost. He won't be able to go forward wherever he goes next. I was just so upset. But here I can see that Priest Liang thought of everything like this. I feel so relieved, so at peace, so grateful."

But not all reception to the monastery's memorial has been positive: Liang was accused of using the memorials to try to spread his religion and make money through donations, and has even received death threats online.

He denies those accusations -- and in fact has refused donations for the tablets, despite spending over $29,000 (200,000 yuan) on them so far.

"The hardest thing is to keep going. Will these tablets be damaged beyond repair in 10 or 20 years? So we maintain them every day, we clean them each day. Then we wait to see if, once this coronavirus disaster has passed, will people still remember them? This is the biggest hurdle."