Practice of using apartments to store relatives’ ashes has risen as rapid urbanisation and aging 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.
The practice of using an apartment to store ashes, known as a “guhui fang”, or bone ash apartments, has grown as rapid urbanisation and a fast-ageing population increases competition and cost for limited cemetery plots in cities.
