Grave matters

"It was quite expensive," Yu, who works for a trade company in Shanghai, remarked. "Although my mother was originally from Ningbo (a coastal city in Zhejiang Province), and it's much cheaper to buy a grave there, we didn't want to place her grave elsewhere because that would be too far away for us to visit."

Government statistics show that around 100,000 people die in Shanghai each year. The city has set aside 400 hectares of land for cemetery use and there are only about 130 hectares left, said Lu Chunling, director of the funeral administrative department in Shanghai.

Lu said about 90 percent of families choose to bury their relatives in graves after cremation. It is estimated that cemeteries will fill up by about 13 to 20 hectares every year. "Soon Shanghai will run out of space," Lu said.

Shanghai did not have public cemeteries until the mid-1980s. Before then, most Shanghainese bought tombs in the neighboring Jiangsu or Zhejiang provinces.

Over the past decade, the number of cemeteries have gone up, and so have prices. The famous Longhua Cemetery in the southwest part of the city is running short of graves.

Average prices of graves range from 10,000 ($1,250) to 40,000 yuan ($5,000) and upwards in Shanghai. In the Fushouyuan Cemetery, one of Shanghai's most popular memorial spots, the cheapest tomb about 1.5 square meters, costs 19,800 yuan ($2,500). The most expensive tomb covering 7.45 square meters plus, costs 120,800 yuan ($15,100).

Around 70 million square meters of land is made over to cemetery use in China each year and the government exercises strict control over the approval of land for cemetery use.

In some parts of China, it has become so expensive to buy a grave that one just cannot afford to die. Xihai Metropolis Daily recently reported how a reader had complained to the newspaper that it had cost him 214,000 yuan ($27,000) to buy a grave in Xining, capital of Northwest China's Qinghai Province.

Unlike Yu in Shanghai, who lives in the country's economic hub and has a monthly salary of 7,000 yuan ($900), the reader surnamed Yang and his wife take home a combined monthly wage of just 1,500 yuan ($190).

When put in perspective however, things are not as bad as they seem for Yu or Yang as they can always make more money. Liu Hua however, whose mother died two years ago, has met great difficulties in finding a burial spot that is up for sale.

"There is just no place for a grave here," Liu said, who lives in Yangquan, North China's Shanxi Province. "The cemetery management said that they have no more graves to sell and the government has no plans to approve more land for cemeteries," she added.

Compared with Liu, Zhang Ping was luckier. "It didn't take us too much time to find a tomb for my mother," said Zhang, whose mother died last month. She paid 12,000 yuan ($1,500) for a double grave covering 0.3 square meter in the suburbs of Shanghai.

"It is small, but we felt that it was enough for the ashes," Zhang said.

Indeed, the smaller graves are part of the Shanghai government's efforts to solve the shortage of cemetery land, which limits the size of a grave to within one square meter.

According to the Shanghai Funeral Association, there are currently 6,000 graves of one square meter or less. If the small graves are widely accepted, Shanghai will save about 300 hectares of land and the new scheme will act as an example for other big cities.

Zhu Jinlong, director of the Shanghai Funeral & Interment Service Center, said that the current Shanghai Public Cemetery Administrative Regulations may be amended to solve the problem of the rapid dwindling of land available for graves.

The amended regulations will shorten the right of access to each tomb from 70 years down to between 20 and 30 years from the date of purchase. In addition, the area of each plot is to be cut from the current 3 square meters to just 1 square meter, Zhu said.

In fact, small graves have grown quite popular among Shanghainese. According to the Fushouyuan Cemetery, which started promoting the "land conservation" type tombs, 25 percent of their clients chose the small tombs last year, and this year its sale has accounted for 37.5 percent of the cemetery's total sales.

Meanwhile, the city is also pushing for wall tombs boxes containing ashes are formed as part of a wall, along with sea burials and tree burials. However, these new ways of burial have not been widely accepted by the public.

"The traditional concept that one must go into the earth after death is still deeply rooted," said Li Shihua, who works in the Songhe Cemetery, where lawn ash scatterings have received little recognition.

Because of the traditional concept of grave burials, and even though the city has been advocating sea burial for more than 10 years, the number of people who choose such unconventional methods of burial is still very small.

According to the Feisi Sea Burial Service, it costs just 150 yuan for a collective sea burial a fraction of the cost of a grave.

In 2002, the city started to subsidize 400 yuan toward the cost of a sea burial. The number of sea burials has been growing and more than 13,000 families have decided to scatter the ashes of their loved ones at sea.

The younger generations are more open to accept the government's new suggestions, whilst the older generations usually stick to the traditional way.

Indeed, Yu said she wouldn't mind if her relatives chose such unconventional methods of burial for herself when the time comes. "I don't mind the idea of a sea burial as it is also a way of going back to where we came from."

(China Daily 04/05/2007 page20)