The Guardian

'Can't afford to die': China embraces eco burials as plot prices outstrip housing

Desire to honour ancestors sees some families buy an apartment to house cremated remains
Tombs are prepared in Fuzhou, Fujian province, ahead of China’s qingming jie, or tomb-sweeping festival, on Friday. Photograph: China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

This week, seven families laid the remains of their loved ones to rest in the Tianshou cemetery on the outskirts of Beijing. But these were burials with a difference. The families rode in golf carts made to look like hearses and scattered flower petals over a small plot of grass where biodegradable jars containing the ashes of their relatives were buried.

The area reserved for the green burials can fit more 2,000 of the jars, buried in layers in the

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Guardian

The Guardian4 min read
The Big Idea: Should We Abolish Literary Genres?
In her Reith lecture of 2017, recently published for the first time in a posthumous collection of nonfiction, A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel recalled the beginnings of her career as a novelist. It was the 1970s. “In those days historical f
The Guardian8 min read
PinkPantheress: ‘I Don’t Think I’m Very Brandable. I Dress Weird. I’m Shy’
PinkPantheress no longer cares what people think of her. When she released her lo-fi breakout tracks Break it Off and Pain on TikTok in early 2021, aged just 19, she did so anonymously, partly out of fear of being judged. Now, almost three years late
The Guardian3 min readWorld
Historians Come Together To Wrest Ukraine’s Past Out Of Russia’s Shadow
The opening salvo in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year was not a rocket or a missile. Rather, it was an essay. Vladimir Putin’s On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, published in summer 2021, ranged over 1,00

Related