The game of death: my three hours in a moral maze at Shanghai museum, how I won, and what I learned about life
This could be the strangest museum experience ever: answering questions in a room with strangers – such as whether you would torture a child to save others’ lives – and voting to send them to an incinerator if you don’t accept their answers
Shanghai’s museum of death, cremation and rebirth is slowly dying itself.
Called Xinglai (Chinese for “awaken”), it will close its doors next April on the Ching Ming Festival, the day when Chinese honour their dead and visits the graves of ancestors – the same day it opened in 2016.
Death is one of the biggest taboos in China. I join a group of others at the Xinglai museum to get an insight into the experience it offers, and to see whether I will leave the museum with a fresh perspective on life.
I find myself in a circular room with 11 strangers. We are each given a number, a seat, and a device to vote and eliminate others. We are now in a game of survival. When a person is voted out they enter a tunnel to a conveyor belt that leads them to a fake incinerator, after which they climb through a cocoon that symbolises the womb.
It is reminiscent of the classic 1957 film 12 Angry Men , where jury members deliberate in a murder trial, except we are not here to defend the innocence of the accused, but to give our opinions on a variety of scenarios.
The host, who remains out of sight for the duration of the game, greets us and asks the first in a series of questions. You are the leader of an anti-terrorism squad and a terrorist has planted a bomb that could kill hundreds. The only way you can get him to speak is by torturing his two-year-old child. Would you do it?