The 49 days, the 100 days, and the first year

This page does one thing. It puts these words on a single line, says where the numbers come from, and marks plainly which parts nobody seems to have settled, including us.

Practice varies a great deal between families, places and religions. Where we write “some families”, that is as far as our sources go.

What do the four words mean?

One line each first:

• 頭七 (tóuqī), “the first seven”. Not the first seven days: it is the offering made when the first seven-day period is reached, the first of a series.
• 做七 (zuò qī), “doing the sevens”. A rite every seven days, up to seven times: seven sevens, 49 days. In Taiwan it is also called 做旬.
• 百日 (bǎirì), “the hundred days”. An observance at one hundred days.
• 對年 (tuì-nî), “the first anniversary”. A full year after the death. Tuì-nî is the Taiwanese Hokkien reading, not Cantonese.

These four definitions are not ours, and they are not a Hong Kong source. They come from the Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwanese published by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education.

So they are the official Taiwanese wording. That is not the same as how your family names these days, or how Cantonese-speaking families keep them. We use it because it was the firmest definition we could find, and we say where it comes from every time.

One more thing from the dictionary entry for the first seven is a folk legend, as recorded in Taiwan’s dictionary: that on this day the spirit of the person who died comes back to look around the home. The dictionary gives it as a legend, and that is how we pass it on. We mention it only because relatives may bring it up; we are not suggesting you do, or avoid, anything because of it.

Why 49 days?

The number was not picked at random.

Buddhist teaching describes a stage between a death and the next birth, called 中有 (zhōngyǒu) or 中陰 (zhōngyīn), which we render in English as “the intermediate state”. In that account, the stage lasts at most seven periods of seven days. Seven times seven is 49.

The Chinese Wikipedia article on 中有 quotes a Buddhist treatise, the 瑜伽師地論 (Yogācārabhūmi):

To be clear about what we have and have not read: we found this passage in an encyclopaedia article and have not opened the treatise itself. So we treat it as a quotation passed on by the encyclopaedia, not as something we checked at source.

The arithmetic itself, one rite every seven days and at most seven of them, is one of the few places where two sources agree: the Chinese Wikipedia article on 做七 and the Taiwanese dictionary entry for 做旬.

Is it Buddhist or Taoist?

Both traditions have their own version. That much we can say.

Which came first, we will not say. Our main source here, the Chinese Wikipedia article on 做七, contradicts itself: one sentence says Taoism borrowed the idea from Buddhism, and a later one says Buddhism borrowed a Taoist practice.

When a source argues with itself, we do not pick a side for it. The sevens are not the property of one tradition, and we have no source that settles which one had them first.

Which day does the count start from?

This is the question people ask most, and the one with the least answer. We found three accounts, and they differ. Two of them are in the same encyclopaedia article.

So one source does not say; the other gives a general version and a Hangzhou one.

We will not pick one for you. That is not modesty: we have no official or academic source that could settle which account is right.

In practice, if someone in the family has always done it a certain way, their version is the answer. If a funeral director or officiant is handling things, theirs is. These practices are handed down between people, not looked up in a book.

Going straight from the last seven to the hundred days

Not every place does every step. One practice is written down:

The article does not explain what 作旬 means in the first half; the second half says this is why Han Taiwanese call the sevens 作旬. We could not resolve it further.

In other words, Chinese Wikipedia records that from the Qing period, families in Taiwan usually went from the last seven straight to the hundred days. It is how one place has done it, written down, not a shortcut someone invented.

The hundred days has a smaller gap. The Taiwanese dictionary entry for 百日 gives two meanings, “one hundred days” and “a hundred-day memorial”.

The dictionary’s example, 做百日, is glossed as a rite held ‘when a full hundred days have passed after the death’. So it counts from the death. Whether the day of death itself counts as day one, it does not say, and we could not find a source that does.

When is the first anniversary?

The Taiwanese dictionary defines 對年 in one line: “a full year after a person’s death”. It is the cleanest of the four definitions, and it is the same day your family may call the first 忌日, the death anniversary.

Whether Cantonese-speaking families in Hong Kong use the word 對年 at all, we could not find a source to say.

Lunar or Gregorian date? We have no source that settles this. What the day itself involves, and the lunar-or-Western question in full, are on a separate page: What do you do on a Chinese death anniversary?

What does “three years” mean?

Older relatives sometimes speak of “three years”. The phrase needs care, because the “three years” people mention today and the classical three-year mourning in old texts may not be the same thing.

The classical side does have a source text. The ritual classic 儀禮 (Yili), in its chapter on the offerings after burial, sets out an order of rites, one after another.

We stop there. Turning that order into a number of months depends on later commentaries, which we have not read, so we will not tell you how long “three years” is. What families mean by it today, and when they mark it, we could not find a source for either.

What does this look like in Hong Kong?

We read two Hong Kong studies funded by the Lord Wilson Heritage Trust. On this subject, they were the fullest we could find.

First, what one of them leaves out. It is an illustrated research report on Hong Kong Chinese funeral customs, 112 pages, running from collecting the body to placing the ashes. None of its sections covers the sevens, the first seven, the hundred days or the first anniversary.

Second, the other one mentions the sevens, as something being pushed aside:

Third, in many Hong Kong families, mourning in practice ends on the day of the burial. The illustrated report says:

One more. Older rites had offerings after the burial called 虞祭. The same report describes a Hong Kong counterpart, 送土三朝, “the three mornings after burial”: the family, missing the person, “would return to the grave within three days to make offerings and mourn”. It then adds that the rite “has now been simplified” and is carried out straight after the burial.

Three days, compressed into one.

What these lines support is “compressed” and “pushed aside”. They do not support “Hong Kong families don’t do the sevens or the hundred days”, and those are very different claims. How many families still keep them, we have no figures for, and we will not pretend to.

If your family ended mourning at the burial itself, a Hong Kong study records that many families do the same.

Why so much “we could not find”?

Not for lack of looking.

The fullest Hong Kong funeral study we found does not cover these four words. The other lists the sevens among rites being pushed aside. And many families end mourning on the burial day. Together, they point one way: this part of the sequence has not been well recorded, at least for Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, when we searched the Chinese terms for Hong Kong in September 2026, the first page was almost all taboo lists: what not to do, what could go wrong. (That search was not run on Google Hong Kong, so we treat it as an observation, not data.)

So there is no taboo list on this page. Not one item, on purpose.

We are not saying we know the right answer. We are saying there isn’t a single one, and nobody should be using that to frighten you.