Legacy Matters

No Room for the Dead in Hong Kong

Hong Kong, one of the most crowded cities on the planet, is running out of space for the dead and causing all sorts of problems for those who want to follow the Chinese tradition of visiting ancestors' graves.

The Dead, Too, Find Hong Kong Really Overcrowded

Even the Southern Chinese custom of a double burial in which the remains are dug up after 7 to 10 years, then cleaned of all hair and skin, reassembled in an urn and buried in a horseshoe-shaped grave, takes up too much room.

A permanent  burial can cost as much as $36,000, so more and more, the dead are cremated and the ashes tucked into a niche in multi-story columbaria, where incense can be burned in a trough at the base of the wall.

But the columbaria are running out of room as well.  Some families must wait 2 years for a niche.  People object to building new columbaria because they don't want the ghosts of the dead near their neighborhoods.

By 2012 half of the people who die each year may not get a final resting place.    So now, the government is subsidizing scatterings at sea for about  $40.