Dead People Wait in Line to be Buried in Hong Kong

With 7 millions of population, Hong Kong has got the fourth place of the most populated cities worldwide. In Hong Kong, it even hard just to find a place for sit down and relax, park benches are packed and strangers share tables at restaurants.

Moreover, to respite after their death, the bodies always get difficulties to be buried and have to wait in line. While a land shortage forced Hong Kongers to surrender on burials long ago — only 11% of bodies were buried in 2007 — the city has also run out of space for cremated ashes. From this condition, means that roughly 50,000 families must store their relatives' remains in home funeral and offices while they wait — often for years — to secure a 1-sq-ft resting place.

On April 14, the government started accepting applications for new cremation niches at its Diamond Hill columbarium, a massive building which stores cremation urns. The 18,500 new niches, the largest new public supply in almost a decade, required almost 1,000 http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=528171681201354141#people to line up outside the columbarium office to personally submit their applications on opening day.

To overcome the problem, Hong Kong government actually plan to built 37.000 new niches which will be operated by 2012. But the number can only meet one year of cremation. Based on government estimation, until 2016, more than half of dead people in Hong Kong will hard to find a niche in public columbaria. A limited number of used niches open up from time to time and the wait can last longer than four years, and there are already 9,500 people on the waiting list.

For rich families, burial is still an option. Permanent plots are scarce and can cost up to $30,000. In average temporary plots can be rented for $3,000 from the government for 10 years, after which the family can renew for another decade, or exhume the remains and yield the plot to someone else. Jockeying for burial space has been so intense in which 18 cemetery supervisors were arrested for allegedly accepting bribes in order to exhume remains before they had fully decomposed last year. Along with all of these difficulties, people with overseas relatives have sent the dead bodies abroad to bury, particularly in the U.S. and Canada.