The ceremony concludes with the tossing of flower petals. The relatives, huddled at the stern of the boat, lean towards the sea to say their last goodbyes to their deceased, whose ashes slowly sink into urns made of sea clay. There are 91 people on board. And four dead to say goodbye to. It is a group sea burial, very common in the city of Jinan, on the east coast of China.
It is also a completely free burial. Local authorities finance the boat service for residents to promote what are sold in the Asian giant as “ecological burial practices”. They have been promoting for three decades and each time they have more followers. Near Jinan, in the coastal city of Qingdao, this week they are going to celebrate another group burial at sea for a dozen dead from Xi’an, a city in the interior, almost 1,200 kilometers from there. The Government of Xi’an subsidizes the family members the trip and the boat trip, in addition to 5,000 yuan, which in exchange is around 660 euros, for opting for burial at sea.
If we go northeast, to the port of Dalian, facing North Korea, from there Captain Chen Qi leaves almost daily with his 33-meter yacht full of groups who want to throw the remains of their deceased into the sea. Chen, as he told in an interview with the China Daily newspaper, has been at the helm of one of the country’s largest burial-at-sea service companies for 23 years.
“More than 7,000 ashes a year we spread into the sea from the four ships we manage,” said Chen, who gave three reasons why people are increasingly opting for this type of burial: “Some have special feelings for the sea, because “They have been raised in coastal areas, while others cannot be buried in family graves due to local traditions, such as suicide-related deaths. Then there are families who cannot afford a traditional burial on land.”
In Dalian, the collective burial at sea does not exceed 1,000 yuan (130 euros), and the private one is around 10,000 (1,300 euros). For a traditional burial, on land, they can pay up to 100,000 yuan (13,100 euros). Chen explained that the local authorities left his company a specific place in the sea, 1.86 square kilometers, 30 minutes by boat from the pier.
The urns used are biodegradable. “Guiding more people to choose green funerals means less farmland will be taken up by traditional burials, which can help keep the country’s farmland area above the red line of around 1.12 billion hectares,” explained this weekend in an interview with the Chinese newspaper Global Times Peng Xizhe, director of the Fudan University Center for Population and Development Policy Studies.
In Shanghai, the most populous city in China (more than 26 million inhabitants), these burials at sea began in 1991. Fewer than 300 services were given per year then. Now it exceeds 5,000. This is done by the operator Feisi, who takes out the boat with private and group burials twice a day. The authorities of the financial center also offer incentives: 3,000 yuan to families and 1,600 to the funeral company.
In China, especially in urban areas, most residents choose cremation for their deceased and then the first option is to bury the ashes in the graveyard of the cemetery where the ancestors are. But in cities like Shanghai, burial grounds began to fill up years ago, and prices for traditional burials have been rising, as has the cost of a plot to lay a grave.
Prohibitive prices for many families, who finally decide to forget about the land and look at the sea. More now after the remains of the last deceased former president of China ended up in the water. That, according to local media, triggered the demand for burials at sea.
The ashes of former leader Jiang Zemin, who died on November 30 at the age of 96, were scattered at the mouth of the Yangtze River from a warship that left Shanghai’s Wusong military port. Jiang’s relatives also threw flower petals.
Many Chinese find it hard to accept these “ecological burials” as most feel very attached to their funeral customs, especially during the Qingming festival, which for Spain would be the equivalent of All Saints’ Day. For at least two millennia, the Chinese have gone to the graves of their ancestors on the 15th day after the spring equinox to remove weeds, clear the soil and deposit food.
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