A woman places flowers and offerings on her fathers miniture grave
© AFP Peter Parks

BEIJING (AFP) - "My father was a forward-looking, modern person. He didn't want to use the burial methods of the 'old society'," Gao's daughter Zhou Ying said, referring to the traditional Chinese preference for an ostentatious tomb.

The final resting place for Gao, an engineer who died last year at 73 -- is the antithesis of that.

The small drawer containing his incinerated remains is inserted into a 10-foot (three-metre) high wall at a cemetery north of Beijing, nearly lost among dozens of others.

The so-called "wall burial" is one of several space-saving methods slowly gaining a foothold in China, but none too soon.

China has long struggled with how to feed a country whose population now tops 1.3 billion, but burial choices like Gao's provide a possible answer to a new question: where to bury the country's vast numbers of dead?

In the time it takes to read this sentence, several more Chinese will have died -- more than eight million annually -- and death is becoming one of the country's fastest growing industries.

This has created a challenge for a country where land supply already is being pressured by a sustained development boom and the need to preserve life-giving agricultural lands.

Visitors pass the burial wall at Changpingyuan,
© AFP Peter Parks

"Our population is a big problem. Graves take up more and more space each year and we must address this," said Zhang Qing, vice chief of Beijing's Funeral and Internment Management Section, on a tour of Changpingyuan, a leafy park-like cemetery south of Beijing that offers several of the newer methods.

These include "tree burials," in which cremated remains are interred under a nameplate beneath a tree, and the similar "grass burial."

The memorial park also features sea burials on its list of services, which range from about 2,000 to 10,000 yuan (260-1,300 dollars, 195-975 euros).

All are major departures from traditional Chinese attitudes, which hold that the dead cannot find everlasting peace unless buried intact in a grave or tomb -- the larger, the better.

"Attitudes are changing in today's China. Some care more about the environment, but cost is also a factor as buying a regular burial plot is getting more and more expensive," Zhang said.

But not everyone is getting the message.

For many, rising incomes have only increased the appetite for traditional grave burials and large tombs.

Although Chinese law officially requires that all dead be cremated, only 48 percent were last year, down from 53 percent in 2005, according to government figures.

And amid high demand, a speculative boom has hit China's burial business, with speculators snapping up plots to sell to the highest bidder.

State media said recently simple plots on the capital's outskirts now sell for about 2,500 yuan (320 dollars) per square metre (about 10 square feet), nearly 15 times higher than 10 years ago.

The cost of a decent funeral also has risen to between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan (1,300 and 2,600 dollars) in major cities, state media reported recently.

A worker tends to miniture graves at Changpingyuan
© AFP Peter PARKS

The phenomenon has prompted a new government crackdown on the trade, limiting purchases of any burial site to those holding death certificates.

"Some cemeteries have been speculating illegally in tomb plots. This is contrary to the public interest and has sparked widespread protests," said a notice last month from the State Council, China's cabinet, accompanying the new rules.

Whether the clampdown is effective remains to be seen. Like the cremation requirement, a rule limiting each grave to one square metre has long been ignored.

Many rural regions lack crematoriums altogether, forcing the use of more land-gobbling traditional graves.

As a result, the government has been aggressively promoting space-saving alternative methods, such as Beijing's Changpingyuan.

Zhang said many Chinese wander into the cemetery, mistaking it for a park, with its grassy expanses and trees.

"Traditional cemeteries are bare and ugly. But here there is grass and trees, a nice environment for my mother," said 75-year-old Liu Fan while arranging offerings of Chinese buns and fruit at her mother's grass burial site as easy listening music drifted from unseen speakers.

"We are more cultured people here in Beijing. We're not farmers."

©AFP