out with the old...
Yesterday, the BBC reported a tidbit about the
price of grave plots around Shanghai. Apparently, the generalized property bubble has produced a sharp spike in the market for graves. It is estimated that the 333 hectares of land reserved for graves in Shanghai will be used up in five years.
Official strategies for dealing with the problem apparently DON'T include reserving more land. Rather they "include restricting the size of graves to one square metre and reducing the right of access to each tomb from 70 years to 20 or 30 years." This would give enough time for thorough decomposition, I suppose, at which point the plot becomes available for a new customer.
[Ray added, 07apr...]
You can't take it with you, so make a big home for your corpse's belongings.... In Korea, graves make up over 1% of the land mass. (That's a 1994 statistic, so it's probably much worse now.) It's a Korean no-no to cremate, and the average grave measures over 40 square meters, which I suppose is a little better than the
ancient burial mounds. Thus the client's motivation behind
our columbarium project; the government wanted to make cremation socially acceptable, if not hip.
* joshua, 4/07/2004 12:56:06 PM
