A friend's mom was in Taiwan visiting him, and as he had to work, I spent a few days showing her around. One time we were out and there was this very large beautiful building on the side of a mountain and she asked me what it was. My response was that I wasn't 100% positive, but that I was pretty sure that it was a giant mausoleum.
Yep in Taiwan the dead get the best views. Mountain sides have either sprawling cemeteries or they have large mausoleums. Something about the dead needing to have a great view.
In Taiwan the dead are mostly cremated, and put into urns. However there is a practice of burying the body in a coffin, but not embalming the body. This way it decomposes quickly and after a certain time the body is dug back up, and the bones are put into urns.
Since no matter what they end up in urns, the dead don't need much space, so while cemeteries may cover a side of the mountain, each family will have it's own small structure (like a big stone horseshoe shape, i'll get a picture eventually) and inside it has the earns of many deceased ancestors. But the upkeep is hard and there are no cemetery groundskeepers. In fact there is a holiday that is just for people to go to their family's plot and clean it.
Because of this pain, more and more people are choosing to put their deceased in big mausoleums that look like large extravagant hotels. The top few floors are for housing the urns. And if you want to come to visit your ancestor, you go to a private room and they bring the urn down for you. But the amazing part are the first few floors having large rooms for funerals and gatherings, restaurants, shops, KTVs (karaoke) and even more things. The idea is that to get people to visit their dead family they need to have some activities there for them to enjoy. Especially since the nicest of them are quite far away and hard to get to, so it's a whole day activity.
The one thing that i have always been curious about is if these cemeteries are taking up such attractive land, what happens when more and more people want to live in those beautiful places with nice views. Well today's picture answers this question...the government destroys the cemetery. Previously in this location was a small cemetery I found about two years ago. At that time when I went to take a look had urns broken on the ground, some caskets broken open, dead body parts (you may remember some pictures of this from an old blog, but i didn't put up the more graphic ones). Well finally I got the answer as to what was going on, as going back there a few months ago I found that the government is now doing some construction there.
I guess the dead must make way for the living. Not quite sure that's what they mean though when they say "out with the old, in with the new."
