In China these days, just about every form of commerce is thriving, including decidedly illegal ones like prostitution and counterfeiting. But not coffin making.
For centuries, this city's Longevity Lane was the best-known place in China to buy top-quality cedar coffins. Legend has it that the city's reputation was established when Liu Zhongyuan, a great poet of 9th-century China, died here in domestic exile and his body was placed in a cedar coffin for shipment to his home province in northern China. After a journey of six months, the poet's body is said to have been as fresh as the day he died.
Ask for a coffin here these days, though, and a visitor is sent to a department store, where miniature mahogany coffins sell for US$2 apiece as unlikely good-luck charms. Instead -- Western executives worried about illegal copying, please take note -- a strictly enforced ban prevents the sale of coffins in the city.
The ban on coffins shows that when the Chinese government really tries to enforce regulations, it can still effectively do so. The suppression of coffin sales and the requirement that the dead must be cremated instead of buried began soon after the Communist takeover in 1949, it was aimed in part at preventing ostentatious funerals and preserving land for other uses.
Pre-Communist society in China put such an emphasis on funerals that families spent up to three years actively mourning a death and sometimes even sold daughters to pay for elaborate temple rituals commemorating an elder member, according to Ho Pui-yin, a historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
"The whole family spent a lot of money and suffered a lot," she said.
Few tasks in any society are as sacred as the disposal of the dead, and that is even more true in a society with traditions of ancestor worship and Confucian respect for parents. So despite the general ban, the tradition remains alive, if only barely. A few cedar coffins are still being made, almost entirely by hand, in backyard workshops in places like Liudao, a tiny village nearly two hours' drive from Liuzhou.
Craftsmen there follow techniques handed down over hundreds of years, but even in Liudao, burials are strictly prohibited. They are allowed only in remote parts of China.
"The ordinary people who live in villages all want to be buried, not cremated," said Liang Yandang, a 67-year-old resident of Liudao, as he wistfully watched a coffin being fashioned in a backyard workshop.
Coffins are not cheap -- several months' income for a peasant -- but would be worth the expense in the eyes of many Chinese if they were allowed, Liang added. "Burial is much better luck for the descendants than cremation," he said. "The government bans burials, but if it is legal when I die, I want to be buried."
Given the rampant capitalism in virtually every aspect of Chinese commercial society, the nearly total ban on burials is quite an achievement. It is particularly notable because Chinese attach a special meaning to the word coffin, or guan cai, which sounds like a combination of the words for "government official" and "fortune."
A greater threat
Coffin souvenirs here are painted in beautiful calligraphy with characters wishing "Good fortune and promotion to a higher rank."
By contrast to their success banning coffins, China's leaders have repeatedly failed at stamping out counterfeiting and copyright violations. Illegal copies of the latest Hollywood movies are sold openly for US$1.25 apiece at a store around the corner from Longevity Lane, where a large banner also announces that 120 movies can be rented for the equivalent of US$3.60.
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