China cracks down on ‘bone ash apartments’ amid skyrocketing cemetery costs

Buildings stand in the Central district of Hong Kong, China, on Monday, June 27, 2016. Photo by Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg

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China is cracking down on families who opt to bury their dead in empty high-rise properties — known as “bone ash apartments” — rather than pay skyrocketing costs for cemetery plots.

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A new law will come into effect on Tuesday to outlaw the practice, which has grown as rapid ageing meets a property bust, making residential apartments better value than cemeteries as a place to honour the remains of loved ones.

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“When a space loses its value as a place to live, people find a new value for it. And for many, that new value is storing ashes,” said Xinyi Wu, a University of California, Irvine PhD student and author of a study on the practice called “Space for the Departed.”

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The new law comes as China prepares to celebrate the Qingming grave-sweeping festival on Sunday. Rapid urbanisation has raised demand for limited cemetery plots in cities.

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Coupled with this, China’s population is ageing at one of the fastest paces in history. The number of deaths in 2025 was 11.3 million, up from 9.8 million in 2015 and outpacing 7.9 million births last year.

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In contrast to apartments, whose prices have fallen sharply since President Xi Jinping‘s campaign that “properties are for living in, not for speculation,” cemetery plots have become prohibitively expensive.

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A global funeral expense survey in 2020 by the insurer SunLife showed that China’s average funeral expenses were the second-highest in the world at about US$5,400, after Japan, accounting for about 45 per cent of average annual wages.

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While residential properties in China carry 70-year usage rights from the government, cemetery plots come with only a 20-year lease.

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Wu said that while the new law would probably stop companies or real estate brokers from openly selling “bone ash” apartments, she suspected that private families would quietly continue the practice.

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The use of bone ash apartments “tends to happen more often in families with strong clan-based values or in families that own multiple properties,” Wu said.

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She added that families still considered these properties as assets that could be sold later if they appreciated in value.

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Despite the taboo over death in China and some hostile online commentary, many younger tenants did not mind their neighbours being dead if it drove down rents in the building, she said.

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“They feel that if living next to a bone ash apartment means their own unit costs a bit less, then it’s not entirely unacceptable — as long as they don’t have to see it day to day.”

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Under the new law, the government is encouraging alternative funeral practices, known as “ecological burials” — such as discarding a loved one’s ashes at sea — because they are cheaper and have less impact on the environment and limited land supplies.