QIAOJIA, Yunnan, Aug. 7 -- The family of Tang Xingqiao hold a somber ritual to mark the end of her 49-year life with simple items salvaged from piles of rubble they once called home before Sunday's earthquake.

In line with the tradition in Hongyan village, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Tang was buried near the home, perched on a hillside, not long after her lifeless body was found on Monday. Rescuers said she fell down a cliff while herding sheep.

"The ritual is held three days after one's death to symbolize that everything about the person is over," says Tang's daughter Bai Kailan.

The ceremony has become much more common these days in Hongyan where farmers gain meager returns from growing peppers. The catastrophe left dozens dead and missing in the remote settlement and claimed almost 600 lives in other parts of Yunnan.

Tang's relatives make best use of what they have to prepare for the ritual on Thursday morning.

Bai and her brother scatter earth carried from elsewhere with their clothes to their mother's tomb, as a gesture of filial piety. One family member lodges a branch tied with a strip of white clothe into the mound.

Then comes the toughest part. Several young attendants spend 40 minutes pushing boulders up the slope leading to where the burial will take place, before building a platform to hold offerings - in short supply in light of the recent disaster.

After the work wraps up, Tang's husband Bai Hongjin steps in front of the tomb, whispering to his wife, "Rest in Peace, and bless them (the children)." Then Bai turns to their granddaughter and informs her she will never see her grandmother again.

People burn incenses, candles and paper money, which are Tang's personal belongings, dug out from the debris. As a tradition shared by seniors in rural China, Hongyan residents start preparing objects for their own burial ritual, including the coffin, early as their 40s.

Today, however, Tang is not lying in the coffin she chose for herself because the family was unable to recover the heavy box from the rubble of her home.

While the burning smell signifies "ashes to ashes", villager Xie Chengyan is expecting a new life in a tent not far from Tang's home.

"I'm always healthy and strong," says the 21-year-old, who works in the pepper field and washes clothes of her family despite being six months pregnant.

Xie is recovering from a state of anxiety having suffered a fall while working on the farm during the earthquake. She says she had not felt any fetal movement in the days following.

Local medics have advised her to seek medication in the county hospital, but the journey, in which she must be stretchered by quake relief rescuers, means hours of mountain-climbing amid threats from falling rocks.

She decides to make the treacherous trek on Thursday morning. All she prepares to take with her is one suit of clothes, with most of her possessions, including the items painstakingly prepared for her child, buried in what's left of her home.

However, her seemingly grim situation has not broken her spirit. Shortly before she is loaded on to a stretcher and ushered out of the tent, her face breaks into a grin.

"The baby moved," she says.