Funerals and burials are important clan activities in China, part of a large and complex system of clan rituals. Traditional customs dictate that only after a diseased person has been buried can they become an official ancestor and receive sacrifices from their clansmen. Funerals and burials are therefore important rites of passage in Chinese clans that serve to establish bonds between clansmen across generations.

However, rapid social and economic changes in recent decades have led to hundreds of millions of migrant workers leaving their homes to work in cities, with China’s “floating population” now around 385 million. For my doctoral research, I wanted to find out what happens when internal migrants die in today’s China. What I found was that many of the practices surrounding funerals and burials have gone through profound changes.

Migrants who die away from their hometowns often lack the support of family networks, meaning their funerals and related matters are either rushed or neglected. However, most still wish that their bodies be returned to their hometowns after they die so that they can become official ancestors in their clans and receive blessings from future generations.

While clan networks still exist in China, their influence is far weaker now than in the past. Perhaps the best city to observe these changes is Shanghai. During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Shanghai developed into a coastal trading port. In the 19th century, it experienced significant population growth, especially after it was forced to open its port to foreign trade. Migrants from various nearby provinces, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, and Fujian, moved to Shanghai in large numbers, while refugees also poured into the city’s foreign concessions due to unrest, famine, and war.

In 19th century Shanghai, guild halls and “benevolent societies,” community organizations often formed by merchants from the same region, would help arrange and raise money for the funerals and eventual burials of migrants in their hometowns. They generally offered three types of services: coffin, coffin transportation, and the funeral itself in Shanghai. With designated areas to temporarily store bodies before being transported back to their hometowns, this meant that the living and the dead were often in close proximity.

However, it often took a long time, years even, before the dead would be transported back home due to the expensive costs involved and the wait for an auspicious burial location. The guild halls would therefore often need to preserve the bodies for a long period of time. Ceremonies were held when a body was moved either into or out of the guild halls, with sacrifices also offered during Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day.

However, the gradual introduction of ideas surrounding public health from the West led to criticism of these practices. For example, the Scottish physician and medical missionary John Dudgeon argued in 1877 that keeping bodies unburied for years, even decades, increased the likelihood of diseases such as smallpox and cholera spreading.

In response, most guild halls reduced the maximum length of time that a coffin could go unburied from around five to three years in the early Republic of China period (1912–1949). During the 1930s, traditional funerals in Shanghai were gradually replaced by commercial ones held at professional binyiguan, or funeral homes. The outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression also accelerated the shift towards cremations and more efficient funerals as bodies piled up.

In the 1950s, the new government rejected many of the traditional rituals surrounding funerals and burial, instead promoting the more economical and efficient practice of cremation. This was implemented in urban areas nationwide in a bid to save space and money, but it was also met with resistance by those who still placed great value on the body of the diseased.

Today, migrants working in the city are not as dependent on their clans to make a living as they once were. The guild halls and benevolent societies that were once centers of social and economic life no longer exist. Shanghai currently has strict time limits on funeral and burial affairs: Funeral homes are required to pick up the body within 12 hours of receiving notice, and the body must be transported by a funeral home with professional equipment and then cremated within 15 days. For public health reasons, anyone who dies in Shanghai should also be cremated in the city.

With the rise in population mobility, migrants have broken away from their clan networks in their hometowns, taken root in new cities, and integrated into the modern urban system. Traditional funerals and rituals have been replaced by more pragmatic modern funeral practices that emphasize public health and efficiency.

Translator: David Ball; editor: Vincent Chow.

(Header image: A funeral in Beijing, 1924. From the Sidney D. Gamble photographs collection at the Duke University Rubenstein Library/Gado/VCG)