Nanjing will stop at nothing to continue to clean up the city’s air quality. Having thought of just about everything else, a local cemetery has taken to offering bereavers a cash incentive for them to choose the environmentally friendly option for burials.
On 31 March, Yuhua Gongde Garden held an award ceremony with a difference. With its somewhat paradoxical theme, “Return to Nature, Feel the Life”, the 2021 Nanjing Ecological Funeral and Smokeless Cemetery Ceremony took place in Siyuan Ecological Square within the Garden.
More than 200 people from the Jiangsu Funeral Association, Nanjing Funeral & Interment Management Bureau, Yuhuatai District Civil Affairs Bureau, Yuhua Sub District and Huashen Residential Community participated in the activity. Family members who had chosen ecological burials were also in attendance.
During the ceremony, worshippers prayed for the peace of the country and her people, and for the thousands of people interred in Nanjing Yuhua Gongde Garden. The facility was then awarded as the first smokeless cemetery in the city.
Host for the ceremony was Nanjing TV host, Wu Xiaoping, who spoke on behalf of the ecological burial family members. Wu said that the various ecological burial styles launched by Yuhua Gongde Garden are measures to protect the environment, save resources, and benefit the country and her people.
Tree burial, flower-bed burial, wall burial; in recent years the cemetery has launch more than 10 types of ecological burial. Such interments now account for two-thirds of the land use therein.
In addition to the environmental consideration, there is another more practical and pragmatic element to the craze for ecological burial. And that’s land scarcity. Nanjing is growing ever larger and there simply isn’t the land left for the kind of large-scale burial grounds that were commonplace all over China.
This simple fact explains the ¥2,000 offered that same day as incentive to each and every family who committed to a “No Monument, No Ash” ecological burial. It may sound generous, but burial costs in China can soar to be many times this number.
With this year’s Tomb Sweeping Festival underway, so visitor numbers to Nanjing’s cemeteries have swelled. Nanjing Daily reported today, 1 April, that at Gongde Garden, nearly 100 percent of citizens coming to pay their respects are doing so with flowers, rather than by observing more traditional rituals.
Historically, family members should visit their ancestors graves during Tomb Sweeping Festival and offer them tea, wine or food. They would also burn incense and paper money, two of the traditional activities no longer to be found happening in Nanjing’s first ever smokeless cemetery.
