I recently read an article in TheHindu.com that you can read here pertaining to the growth of the Chinese death care industry.  For many years the process of death care in China was one of the family going to a central government cremation center, and watching as their loved one was loaded into the crematory with many symbolic artifacts to go with to the afterlife.

However, as the article points out, that during the last two decades as economic roots took place so did a rise in the wealth of average Chinese residents.  This has led to many of those people wanting more than just the government cremation for their loved ones and one private company, Fu Shou Yuan, has became the established leader in the industry in Shanghai.  The company now has 16 branches in China and, according to the article, their profit margins appear solid.

The article also states that the industry has been noticed by colleges in the country as they are starting to provide course work in fields such as obituary writing, cemetery designing, and embalming.

Funeral Director Daily take:  A friend of mine married into a native Chinese family and told me of the experience when his father-in-law died about 15 years ago of going to a large crematory where there were about 30 retorts in a single location.  The family watched as the body, with many of his prize belongings,  was loaded into the cremation chamber and then a couple of days later received the ashes.  That was really the extent of any services and/or rituals.

Prosperity changes a lot of things.  I’ve read in another article where the Fu Shou Yuan company is buying land for cemeteries so that it can construct elaborate columbariums for those that wish to purchase such.  This type of memorial has long been too expensive for average Chinese families but is now becoming something that is more affordable to the growing middle class.

Fu Shou Yuan has also began offering pre-need funeral and burial contracts in an ever increasing sign that the commercialization of China has reached the funeral and cremation industry also.  It is somewhat interesting to me that in areas of the “developed” world death care memorialization seems to have reached a peak level of revenue per service, but in the recently developed world, including mainland China,  revenues per service are just starting to move up after decades of minimal services. If this is the case, Fu Shou Yuan has a bright future.

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