Traditionally in this part of China, the cremated remains of loved ones were placed into urns, which were in turn interred in the family tomb at the local graveyard. But the graveyards here are becoming too full, and there isn’t enough usable land available to expand them or start new one.

This is a problem reported in many parts of China; I recall reading an article a couple years ago that Shanghai was encouraging its residents to accept “burial at sea,” with cremated remains being dumped into the sea from a dock somewhere in Shanghai. (I’m not sure if this was ever readily adopted.)

Here at Anhai, however, the response was to build a large mausoleum about six years ago for housing the remains.

I understand that I was the first “foreigner” (read: non-Chinese) to visit this mausoleum, but keep in mind that my going there was personal, for my Wife and me and our children to visit my Father-In-Law’s final resting place for the first time. You’ll understand therefore why I keep my descriptions here generic and leave out most of the personal angle to this narrative.

To get to the mausoleum, you have to travel out the northeast side of town–this would probably be called “the other side of the tracks” in some places. It’s an area full of small industrial and metal works, with mostly “Northerners” toiling in them. Some operations there looked like they were solely in the business of collecting huge heaps of rusty scrap metal and machinery. Piles of rubble were everywhere. Passing one small workyard, I saw a poorly dressed fellow in his 20′s squatting down using a blowtorch to cut circles out of a large sheet of metal. He wasn’t wearing protective goggles or gloves, and his shoes were essentially “flip-flops.”

But after passing through this area, there’s a short stretch of semi-rural land (fewer buildings and a few cows running around, at least) before you curve around a former gravel pit that now is a duck farm and park beside the mausoleum.

Chun Jie, the day set aside to visit family tombs, falls in early April this year, and the dead typically aren’t visited during Spring Festival, so we were the only visitors this day. (It’s a packed pandemonium on Chun Jie, however, we’re told, which has prompted some who can afford to do so to buy private small plots of land for creating new family tombs. Instead of all of one’s family’s remains being at a single location, they’re on various floors and in various rooms throughout the building, and you have to visit them all.)

We checked in with the gatekeeper–the man with the key–at the front office to confirm that we had a relative interred here. He scoured through a loosely bound stack of pages, all handwritten, to confirm that the name and location we gave him matched up.

There is no artificial lighting in the building, except for a couple lights in the gatekeeper’s office (I could see that he sleeps in a room just off his office–can’t say that I really envy his assignment). The ground floor especially is very dark, but on this ground floor, there is a large altar for burning incense–a wall hanging with the character meaning approximately “to memorialize” hangs above it.

On the upper floors, there are series of open-face rooms, accessed by external corridors, containing the interred remains. (There are spaces for remains on the ground floor too, but the place seems to be filling from the top down.)

In each room, there are rows of what struck me first as “display” cases, with about an 18″ inch by 18″ inch “locker” for each set of remains. These cases are nine or sometimes ten rows high, and completely line the walls of each of these rooms, which are about 10′ feet wide by 20′feet long, meaning that each room contains the remains of 200-300 people, by my quick estimation.

The “display” cases are rather crude; the shelves are made of metal, painted dark green, and each “locker” has a glass front with a metal frame that has been screwed into place.

The “lockers” are made available on a first-come, first-served basis, but not all cost the same. Spaces on the upper floors cost more than those on the lower floors. In any given room, spaces on the bottom rows of the display cases cost the least, while those higher up cost more–with the exception of those at about eye-level being the most coveted.

Many on the bottom row of the display cases, I figured, were nearly pauper’s graves. Behind the glass front, you see only an urn that has been wrapped in the red cloth with yellow characters coming from the crematory, and maybe a hand-scribbled paper with the name of the deceased on it.

At the “upper end,” people have small “gravestones” created and placed in front of the urns, with a picture of the deceased etched into this dark stone, and writing telling the person’s name and the dates of their birth and death carved sometimes quite exquisitely onto them. The etched pictures are quite good, looking sort of like a stone-carved version of the pictures of people done with pointillistic style on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Most of these cases also have a picture of the deceased. Sometimes it’s the same picture used as the source for the stone etching. Sometimes it’s simply the person’s “hu kou,” or government-issued identity card. And in some cases, liberties are taken to “dress up” the stone-etched version. I caught a glance of one picture of a man perhaps in his mid-30′s with slightly unkempt hair, a plain shirt, and a moustache in need of some trim work. The stone etching made from this photo, however, had given him a haircut, placed him in a nice suit, and cleaned up the moustache a great deal.

One or two photos I saw looked to have been of elderly people taken posthumously.

Most pictures were of older people, but of course not only the elderly die. A picture of a young woman, perhaps 20 years old, looked like a university student photo. And though I wasn’t browsing the stacks at great leisure, I caught glimpses of several children’s pictures too. In one, a little girl around ten years old was wearing a little “graduation” cap and gown, and a beautiful smile, holding a little “diploma” in one hand and a big new stuffed dog in the other. Seeing that one, as a parent, my heart ached.

The display case spaces are small; there’s not much room to place much else into them beside the urns and maybe the small gravestone, but the typical sorts of things that did go into them include things like a pack of cigarettes, small bottles of a favorite beverage, tea cups or small teapots, Afterlife Money, a favorite pair of glasses, a small plastic flower arrangement or–in the children’s cases I did see–a small toy or doll.

Incense is burned here quite a bit, you can imagine, and so everything, even items inside the display cases, are covered with a thin layer of dust.

Although the green metal “locker” shelves give the mausoleum a nearly industrial feel at first glance, and the construction of the building is for the most part typical government drab, it is what it is: final resting place for people who were loved and are missed, including my Wife’s Father.

This is why I took only a couple pictures of the outside of the building, and not any of the small dusty glass and metal tombs.

Here they are, nonetheless: