China to ban storing remains of dead in ‘bone ash apartments’

China is introducing a law to stop people storing the ashes of their dead relatives in empty high-rise flats rather than paying steep costs for increasingly scarce cemetery plots.China’s new funeral management legislation will prohibit the use of “residential housing specifically for the purpose of storing cremated remains” and the burial of corpses or construction of tombs in “areas other than public cemeteries”.The law will come into force on Tuesday ahead of Sunday’s Qingming grave-sweeping festival – a traditional Chinese celebration in which people clean their ancestors’ tombs and make ritual offerings.The practice of using an apartment to store ashes, known as a “guhui fang”, or bone ash apartments, has grown as rapid urbanisation and a fast-ageing population increases competition and cost for limited cemetery plots in cities.The empty apartment is used as a ritual hall, with people transforming the space into ancestral shrines with candles, red lights and urns lined up by generation.After Japan, China’s funeral expenses are the second-highest in the world, according to a 2020 global funeral expense survey conducted by insurer SunLife.In contrast, property prices fell 40% between 2021 and 2025, caused in part by Xi Jinping’s campaign – “properties are for living in, not for speculation” – to curb excessive speculation in the real estate market.China’s cemetery plots also only come with a 20-year lease, while residential properties carry government-backed 70-year usage rights. Consequently, many Chinese citizens now view apartments as better value than cemeteries as a place to store the remains of their loved ones.Graves at a cemetery in Dagantangcun, 30km east of Beijing. Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/GettyA hashtag associated with the ban has been viewed more than 7m times on Weibo, China’s equivalent of X, with social media users expressing scepticism about the measure.“Who’s going to go in and check? Or are they planning to put a GPS tracker on every single urn?” said one user. “Even at 90% off, cemetery plots are still too expensive,” another wrote.China has one of the world’s fastest-growing ageing populations. It recorded 11.3m deaths in 2025, up from 9.8m in 2015, and far more than the country’s 7.9m births the same year.Facing a rising number of burials and increasingly limited land supply, authorities in big cities such as Shanghai are subsidising costs for those who opt for “ecological burial methods”, including “deep-ground burial or sea burial of cremated remains”.In 2025, Shanghai’s sea burials reached a record high, exceeding 10,000 cases for the first time.Additional reporting by Lillian Yang