Many people in China have started buying residential apartments, not to live in, but to store the ashes of deceased family members. These are called bone ash apartments. Some people think it’s creepy and unlucky to be neighbors with them. Others say, “Honestly, I’d rather have dead neighbors than noisy ones.” So, I started asking, how did bone ash apartments become a real alternative to cemeteries in China? This isn’t just about space—it’s about how land, death, tradition, economy, and policy collide in today’s urban China (UN-Habitat 2020).
Bone-ash apartments involve multiple stakeholders across the funeral, real estate, and government sectors. At the market level, funeral workers provide body restoration and memorial services, real estate developers manage the residential spaces that are repurposed for ash storage, and government agencies regulate burial practices and oversee compliance with national policies. Because the Bone-ash apartment is a new phenomenon that hasn’t been previously researched by scholars, I performed thematic analysis of 2,537 user comments from eight posts on Red Note (小红书) to gather public opinion. I also conducted three semi-structured interviews with individuals representing each sector to understand how these actors interact in practice.
These methods support the exploration of three interrelated dimensions that structure the analysis of bone-ash apartments. The following sections examine first, how state-led funeral policy reforms have reconfigured burial practices and spatial governance; second, how evolving moral and ritual frameworks reflect the adaptation of Confucian and popular beliefs under urban modernity; and third, how urbanization and real-estate dynamics have transformed neighborhood relations and reshaped the social meaning of death.
High-density residential towers in Hongkong illustrating the typical urban housing informally repurposed to store cremated remains in urban China. (Photograph by the author)
Historical Background and Need for Reform
Since the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has consistently promoted cremation as a land-saving alternative to traditional burial through national policies implemented by provincial and municipal authorities. Under current regulations, cremation is mandatory in urban areas. If families want to access inheritance, pensions, or government subsidies, they must provide a cremation certificate (Zhu et al. 2004).
According to the Zhejiang Funeral Management Ordinance, a provincial regulation enacted under China’s national Funeral Management Regulations framework, ashes must be placed either in approved public cemeteries, licensed commercial burial grounds, or eco-burial sites. Private burial grounds, including family and clan cemeteries, are explicitly prohibited, a policy that integrates eco-burial into land regulation and reaffirms the state’s secular and moral governance over death (Zhejiang Provincial People’s Government 1998).
As per the official from the Civil Affairs I interviewed, “before funeral regulations are released, public input is collected through the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ website.” Yet while the government has enforced where cremated remains can legally go, it hasn’t kept pace with how people want to grieve. Many families feel that there’s no accessible, emotionally resonant space for their loved ones’ remains, especially for those with deep Confucian values of filial piety. For them, paying respect to ancestors is a moral duty.
Some people think the burial sites are too expensive. In addition, cemetery plots come with only 20 years of usage rights, after which families are required to pay 1% of the original price as a renewal fee every 20 years. In contrast, residential properties come with 70-year land-use rights. This makes residential apartments desirable for storing ashes (Gao 2024 & Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China 1997).
The Bone Ash Apartments are at a grey zone of policy because turning residential units into burial sites is not allowed. As per the civil affairs official, “It goes against the residential function of housing and public norms.” But in reality, the state is under-invested in accessible, meaningful funerary alternatives that are low in price. Bone ash apartments therefore are a private solution to a public infrastructure failure—a way for people to stay connected to their dead in a system that has prioritized efficiency over intimacy.
Changes in Chinese beliefs about death and ritual
In traditional Chinese cosmology, the dead don’t vanish, they transform. A deceased person may become a ghost, a god, or an ancestor, depending on how they’re remembered and ritualized. This mobility is fluid if a spirit is cared for, and over time, it can become a god that protects the whole family. But in cities today, where land is expensive and cemeteries are limited, where do these spirits live? For many, the answer has become bone ash apartments, a space which functions like a ritual hall on the inside. Some families recreate entire ancestral shrines with candles, red lights, and urns lined up by generation.
Since Mao’s anti-superstition campaigns in the mid-20th century, traditional funerary practices like ancestor worship, fengshui, and tomb offerings were condemned as superstitious. Under Xi Jinping, there’s been a partial revival—but only selectively, and mostly for Confucianism and Daoism, rebranded as “cultural heritage” rather than religion.
This selective tolerance reflects a broader pattern seen in modern and postcolonial nation-building across East and South/Southeast Asia, where states sought to ban practices deemed superstitious and anti-progress while promoting carefully curated traditions as markers of cultural identity (Cohen 2020). In China, the ambiguity of religion, superstition and culture caused many people to continue such practices, including owning and selling bone-ash apartments, mostly in secret. As one funeral professional puts it, “They all do it quietly.”
But it’s not just about avoiding government attention—it’s also about avoiding social conflict. There is still a deep-rooted cultural taboo around death, especially when it enters private living space. And yet, belief persists. Surveys show that while only 10% of Chinese adults identify with a religion, 47% believe in fengshui, the spatial philosophy that emphasizes harmony between people and their environment, and over 75% report visiting ancestral graves during Qingming Festival, also known as tomb sweeping day, in which families honor their ancestors by cleaning gravesites, making offerings of food and incense, and engaging in rituals that reaffirm kinship ties across generations (Hackett et al. 2023; Roylance et al. 2017). As one of the Red Note users writes, “I hope I can become a ghost after death and stay with the people I love.”
In bone ash apartments, death becomes spatially proximate and emotionally enduring. But this intimacy creates unease too, especially when yin energy (the energy of the dead world) starts to overlap with yang space (the living space). Bone ash apartments are often sealed, and dark, architecturally mimicking burial fengshui for the dead. This is criticized on social media in comments like, “the windows are sealed, there’s no air—how can the soul leave?”
Some see this as spiritual contamination— by saying “Living in the same building might also be affected.”—while others rationalize it by saying: “Humans are scarier than ghosts anyway.” This contradiction—between ritual need and spatial discomfort reflects a deeper uncertainty about how to house the dead with a condensed population under urbanization in Chinese cities.
Urbanization & Real Estate: The Collapse of the Nearby
In today’s China, real estate is people’s largest and most trusted asset. Nearly 70% of Chinese household wealth is stored in residential property (People’s Bank of China Department of Survey and Statistics, 2020). Property represents a sense of security to have a home, a family, and tangible assets.
At the same time, the government uses land sales to fund local infrastructure, which means local governments have a strong incentive to keep real estate prices high. But with so many homes treated as financial tools rather than living spaces, vacancy rates have risen—especially in smaller cities where demand can’t keep up (Xiong 2023). This is where bone ash apartments enter the picture. For developers, selling to buyers who intend to store urns isn’t ideal—but it’s better than letting properties sit empty. As one real estate professional puts it, “If it won’t sell otherwise, selling it as a bone ash apartment is still a sale.”
Urban mistrust is reflected both in everyday social relationships and in real estate transactions. Here’s the paradox; while people trust property to hold their wealth, they often don’t trust each other. Buyers research dozens of listings and fear scams, while sellers frequently rely on agents, barely investigating the market themselves. This mismatch reflects a broader structural blind spot: cemeteries are formally priced, restricted, and time-bound, whereas residential real estate retains long-term market value and informal autonomy.
As Xiang Biao (2021) observes, the “disintegration of the nearby” describes the erosion of communal proximity under urbanization, where interpersonal relations are increasingly bypassed in favor of self-interest or engagement with global institutions. Neighbors often remain strangers, as one of the online comments notes, “I’ve lived here five years and haven’t even seen my neighbor’s face. Another user writes, “agents knew all along—they just didn’t tell you because they didn’t want to ruin their own business.”
Bone-ash apartments are tolerated not because they are socially accepted, but because residents no longer feel connected enough to resist. Interviewees consistently emphasized the comparative permanence and investment logic of apartments over graves, a rationale echoed online in terms of cost savings, property speculation, and even a preference for “ghost neighbors” over disruptive living ones. These practices form an informal social contract in which trust, familial intention, and emotional value substitute for formal enforcement. Such informal institutions often carry more weight than formal rules when governance is fragmented (Wang 2022). Yet mistrust persists: developers sometimes fail to disclose past deaths or sell “murder houses” without warning, and many urban residents do not know their neighbors. In short, while real estate is deeply valued, the social trust that underpins neighborly relations and buyer–seller interactions is eroding.
To conclude, bone ash apartments are not just a bizarre loophole in urban real estate and policy. At first glance, they seem like a practical solution to land scarcity or high cemetery costs. But if we look closely, they reveal deeper conflicts between tradition and rules, personal loss and public space, spiritual duties and practical city life. What this study reveals is a layered story: First, within the grey zone of legality, we see a policy gap. Second, we see a ritual transformation. Death rituals are moving into private homes with a fluidity between the dead, ghost, and God.
Third, we see a spatial transformation. People no longer feel responsible for what happens next door. They can live next to urns and never notice, and some even welcome bone ash neighbors because they create less disturbance than living neighbors.
While this reflects the breakdown of traditional social intimacy in shared space, it can also be seen as the emergence of a “new” social assemblage, one that simultaneously produces new forms of intimacy and distance, where care, memory, and coexistence are reconfigured around the presence of the dead rather than the living. And in those spaces, bone ash apartments are signs of a culture in transition, carrying the past into uncertain urban futures with quiet persistence.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express her special thanks to Jo Ann Wang, Rushikesh Gawade, and everyone who has supported her for this blog.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Rushikesh Gawade and reviewed by Prerna Srigyan
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