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Saturday April 11, 2009

Grave times ahead as burial plots get scarce

BY CHOW HOW BAN


A SILVER plane rose1,800m above the sea carrying the family of Deng Xiaoping. His widow Zhuo Lin, then 81, threw the ashes of the late Chinese leader into the turbulent sea. That was March 2, 1997 when Deng’s family fulfilled his last wish so that his soul could return to nature.

China has since used this story, and that of former premier Zhou Enlai, to educate the people on the significance of sea burials. But, in actual fact, only a few choose the sea as their final resting place.

At the Binhai Memorial Park in Shanghai’s suburb of Fengxian district, some 8,000-odd names of those who chose sea burial are engraved on seven stone slabs in a small garden. The garden is less than one-tenth of the entire 53ha cemetery where more than 100,000 people were buried.

“Our father was cremated and buried here,” said a visitor to the park. “Though we paid 8,000 yuan (RM4,230) for his small burial plot for a period of 12 years, it’s still worthwhile as we don’t want our relatives to say we are not filial.”

Qiao Kuanyuan, a professor of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and who specialises in funeral and interment, said the traditional mindset of burying the dead had not changed much.

“According to our survey, only 4% of the people accept the idea of sea burial but the actual number of people opting for this method is only 2%,” he said. The payment for sea burials is subsidised. Regardless of who you are, the Government will pay 400 yuan (RM212) if the deceased opt for sea burials. It was 150 Yuan previously. But the problem is that the people are becoming richer and they can afford to buy burial plots.

In 2007 the Government incurred a total of 787,000 yuan (RM415,583) in subsidies for sea burials – the cheapest option as all the family of the deceased needs is to pay for the cremation and ferry fares which can be covered by the subsidy, said Qiao. Some cemetery operators even offer to engrave names of the deceased on memorial stones in a designated area free of charge.

The trend for this land-saving method grows by 10% every year. Since the introduction of sea burials in the city in 1991, a total of 15,424 people had their ashes scattered into the area between Changxing and Hengsha islands. Sea burials are also carried out in Beijing, Tianjin, Dalian, Xiamen, Qingdao, Shenzhen and Zhongshan.

With Shanghai set to run out of burial land in 10 years, the city is also promoting other land-saving and environment-friendly burial methods such as wall and tree burials. A few years ago, the city experimented with miniature burial plots of 0.2 sqm at its 43 cemeteries.

The late Zhou Enlai mentioned about

two stages of funeral revolution. The first saw the change from one that kept the body of the deceased to one that preserves the ashes.

“We allow families to bury ashes of the deceased and 90% of the people opt for this method as it can reduce the cemetery size from 6sqm to less than a square metre,” Qiao said.

He said the next revolution was not preserving the ashes at all and some people had begun non-ashes burial methods such as lawn, flower and of course sea burials.

“We will be looking for various ways of not keeping ashes but at the same time preserving the essence of our culture,” he added.

Qiao said the future may even see families preserve ashes in the form of necklaces, rings or vases.

He said on the average, many in Shanghai die when they are over 81.

There is an old Chinese saying that it is rare for people to live over 70 and therefore, a funeral should be a joyful event if the deceased lived for more than 80 years.

“Throughout the years, we organised events such as flute performances by flutists to send off the departed souls and to ease the pain of their families,” he said.

Many memorial parks were also well landscaped so that visitors could not only honour their ancestors but also walk around the gardens for recreational purposes, he added.

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