Going through a quickly getting older inhabitants and land shortage, the Chinese language capital is piloting burial areas with digital screens as a substitute of headstones. From a report: When somebody dies in Beijing, the physique is often cremated and the ashes are buried behind a headstone in one of many metropolis’s public cemeteries. Household and buddies collect on the web site to gentle candles and burn incense to pay their respects. Zhang Yin, an area resident in her 40s, selected a really completely different burial ceremony when her grandmother died earlier this yr: She had her ashes saved in a compartment of a big room at Beijing’s Taiziyu Cemetery, virtually like a secure deposit field at a financial institution. An digital display screen on the door of the compartment displaying footage and movies of the deceased replaces the standard gravestone. It is a land-saving possibility that is additionally extra reasonably priced and dovetails with the rising pattern of Chinese language households wanting extra personalised funerals for his or her family members.
“Conventional cemeteries are outside, uncovered to the wind and solar,” Zhang says. “If you happen to carry your youngsters there, they’ll solely see naked graves, which has no that means to them. For digital cemeteries, households can watch the photograph show of deceased kinfolk collectively in a corridor.” Zhang says her grandfather gave his approval for the digital funeral as a result of he is very receptive to new issues — and, by coincidence, the area of interest storing her grandmother’s ashes is similar because the variety of her grandmother’s previous home. Each native governments and funeral firms in China are experimenting with new methods of conducting burial rites because the nation confronts city land shortage and a quickly getting older inhabitants.
