The Internet, which has captured most aspects of life in its Web, expanded yesterday into the domain of the dead.
The government’s new website allows people to find out more about getting death certificates from police, transporting corpses to crematoriums, and where to hold funerals and buy flowers and urns on the Internet. The bereaved can also sweep a cyber tomb by searching for the dead and leaving them messages or flowers online.
The promoters of fis.88547.com said they are targeting such people as overseas students who can’t visit their relatives’ tombs during the annual Qingming festival in April.
Other potential customers are people who scattered the ashes of their dead relatives at sea. But so far, few have signed up for the site.
Employees of the city’s funeral agency, the website’s sponsor, asked 5,200 local families that scattered dead relatives at sea whether they would install a memorial page online free of charge. Only 30 said yes.
“We are not discouraged by the slow response because many people who chose funerals at sea are from poor families and have no access to the Internet,” said Li Jun, an agency manager. “But we expect an increasing number of highly educated people will choose this way. We are sure the numbers will grow.”
Li said they hope to develop the Website into the largest online cemetery in the world in three years. Li estimated 20,000 to 30,000 dead people would be listed on the Website in three years.
“Next year, we will sell tombs online at the same time as we sell tombs in the cemetery. With the Internet craze, more people will choose our service.”
The idea of online tomb sweeping came from a person who had no place to observe Qingming because his relative’s ashes were at sea. Less than 1 percent of the funeral agency’s 100,000 dead end up scattered at sea each year.
Wu Yicheng, an official of the funeral service, said potential clients are “either well-educated persons with a strong sense of environmental protection or those from very poor families.”
Traditional burials cost 7,000 yuan (US$840) to buy two tombs outside Shanghai. In contrast, it costs 150 yuan to take a boat to sea.
(eastday.com 11/08/2000)
