China is cracking down on the growing practice of storing human ashes in unoccupied apartments, known as “bone ash” apartments, as a way to circumvent rising cemetery costs, according to the Financial Times. A new law set to take effect on Tuesday will prohibit families from using residential properties as makeshift burial sites, reflecting the country’s struggle to balance rapid urbanisation, an ageing population, and limited land.
The practice has emerged as apartment prices fall under President Xi Jinping’s campaign that “properties are for living in, not for speculation,” while cemetery plots have become prohibitively expensive. Xinyi Wu, a PhD student at the University of California, Irvine and author of the study Space for the Departed, noted that families often store ashes in vacant units because the space has lost residential value but retains asset value for potential resale. “When a space loses its value as a place to live, people find a new value for it. And for many, that new value is storing ashes,” she said.
China’s rapid population ageing exacerbates the trend. The country recorded 11.3 million deaths in 2025, surpassing the 7.9 million births, and making traditional cemetery plots, which typically come with only a 20-year lease, increasingly scarce. In comparison, residential properties carry 70-year usage rights, making them a more stable option for storing ashes. Funeral costs are also a major factor: a 2020 global survey by SunLife ranked China’s average funeral expenses at $5,400, the second-highest in the world, accounting for roughly 45 percent of average annual wages.
Despite cultural taboos around death, many younger tenants appear tolerant of living near bone ash apartments if it reduces rents, Wu said. Families often quietly continue the practice, particularly those with strong clan traditions or multiple properties, even as companies and brokers are expected to cease openly marketing the apartments for ash storage.
The government is promoting alternative “ecological burials,” such as sea dispersal of ashes, which are cheaper and less land-intensive. In Beijing, 30–40 percent of families now choose ecological burials, according to Li, a consultant at the cemetery sales platform Qiuye. Demographers warn that reforms in burial traditions may influence family attitudes and could indirectly contribute to low birth rates. Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison expert on Chinese demographics, argued that “ancestral graves are to China what churches are to the West, profoundly influencing concepts of procreation.”
The Financial Times reports that the new law signals a broader effort by Chinese authorities to regulate both land use and social customs in an era of shrinking populations and urban transformation.
