Practice of using apartments to store relatives’ ashes has risen as rapid urbanisation and ageing population increases competition for cemetery plots
China is introducing a law to stop people storing the ashes of their dead relatives in empty high-rise flats rather than paying steep costs for increasingly scarce cemetery plots.
China’s new funeral management legislation will prohibit the use of “residential housing specifically for the purpose of storing cremated remains” and the burial of corpses or construction of tombs in “areas other than public cemeteries”.
The law will come into force on Tuesday ahead of Sunday’s Qingming grave-sweeping festival – a traditional Chinese celebration in which people clean their ancestors’ tombs and make ritual offerings.
Funeral parlors are predatory. When my father died in 2020, the funeral workers would not stop harassing my mother on a last minute casket upgrade and a cement sarcophagus (why?). I literally had to physically threaten the funeral director to leave her alone. Caskets alone get into $15K+. Fucking ghouls working for very high profit corporations.
Cremation should be a municipal service. I’m not asking my family to waste $20-30K on putting me in a shiny box underground after pumping toxic chemicals throughout my dead body.