My Take | Even in death, Hong Kong’s indigenous villagers live large
For most of us, even getting an urn space to contain our ashes is near-impossible, yet villagers in the New Territories are granted lavish burial sites
It’s good to be an indigenous villager, even if you don’t live in the New Territories, or even in Hong Kong. If you are male, you are guaranteed a plot of land as a birthright that instantly makes you a multimillionaire in today’s property market.
OK, that’s kind of sexist. But when you die, gender equality kicks in. Since the mid-1980s, the government has set aside an estimated 4,000 hectares – about half the size of Hong Kong Island – for indigenous burials. These are not tiny urn spaces, but actual small plots of land. And they can be quite ostentatious, because their physical sizes are ill-defined and rarely enforced, like much else when it comes to land in the New Territories.
Many urbanites can’t afford proper housing in life, or urn spaces when they are dead. But if you are an indigenous villager, you are set for life – and the afterlife.
A new licensing regime will come into effect this summer to regulate operators under the Private Columbaria Ordinance. In light of the new regulatory regime, officials are also thinking of revising utility fees and terms of usage for urns at eight public columbariums.
Queues for the public service range from three to eight years, depending on the location of the columbium. The city is expected to face a shortage of 400,000 urn spaces by 2023 and things will only get worse because of our ageing population. There are about 50,000 deaths each year.