During the annual Qingming Festival, Chinese residents honor their dead ancestors by burning fake luxury items and money, sending them into the beyond for the spirits to enjoy.
In Malaysia, there’s an entire cottage industry of fake items that springs up during the festival, allowing Confucian practitioners to buy all sorts of simulated luxuries expressly for burning.
This year, what’s the hottest fake gadget being burned during Qingming? Fake papercraft models of Apple’s iPad 2, of course.
Reuters spoke to Jeffrey Te, an owner of a Malaysian prayer shop dealing with the sale of fake luxury items. While a 16GB iPad 2 will cost you $499 in the United States and you’ll have to wait weeks for it to be delivered, at Te’s store, you can buy an 888GB iPad 2 for a departed loved one for just a buck.
Unfortunately, just like a real iPad 2, though, if you want a papercraft iPad to burn for a loved one, you’ll have to wait: Te has already sold out of his initial shipment of over 300 fake iPad 2s. If you’ll settle for a fake Samsung Galaxy Tab, though, they’ve got plenty of those… although something tells me burning one of those for a loved one just might result in a haunting.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
