Taiwan's Funeral Culture and Views on Death

30-Second Overview: In 2009, Master Shengyan passed away. His will said simply: "No death notices, no burial mound, no gravestone." His ashes were planted beneath a tree at Jinshan Environmental Life Park, without a name inscribed. That year, Taiwan's cremation rate was already approaching 90% — and by 2024 it had surged to 98.7%, with almost no one choosing burial anymore. From the pole-dancing atop electric flower cars in funeral processions to families quietly scattering ashes at Yongli Park — Taiwan's way of facing death is turning over at the pace of one generation.

On February 3, 2009, Master Shengyan passed away in Taipei at the age of seventy-nine. His will was unusually brief: no death notices, no Buddhist services, no burial mound, no gravestone, no funeral banner, no memorial tablet¹. His ashes were planted in the ground at Jinshan Environmental Life Park, with a tree planted above them, no name inscribed. A religious leader who had influenced millions of followers chose to disappear like a fallen leaf.

He had once said: "Cremated ashes have nothing to do with a person's spirit — they are nothing more than one last bit of carbon."²

In the Taiwan of that time, those words were nearly a cultural earthquake.

Buried in the Earth: The Fixation on Land

In Taiwanese Han tradition, "buried in the ground finds peace" is not merely a saying — it is a belief. The deceased must be interred in a place with good feng shui; the orientation of the grave, the dragon vein, the water opening — all bear on the rise and fall of generations to come. A good grave site could send a family soaring to prosperity; a bad one could bring disaster. People believed this for centuries, at least³.

Funerals were grand affairs. Taoist priests chanted sutras, Buddhist monks recited texts, paper houses and servants dissolved in ash pans. In the Taiwanese countryside of the 1980s, a funeral procession could stretch half a city block: brass bands playing funeral music at the front, mourning family members supporting the coffin in the middle, and behind them a line of elaborately decorated "electric flower cars" — platforms bearing lightly dressed women dancing to ear-splitting Taiwanese folk songs⁴.

💡 Did You Know
"Hsiao-nü Pai-chin" (literally "filial daughter Pai-ching") was a professional mourner in Taiwanese funeral culture. These hired women would kneel before the coffin and wail loudly, their voices amplified by microphones, sometimes crying and singing for hours on end. This profession once made the BBC, regarded by international media as one of Taiwan's most distinctive funeral customs⁵. Today, few families still hire professional mourners, but in rural central and southern Taiwan their cries can still occasionally be heard.

There was also "the five sons weeping at the grave" — five adult men playing the role of the deceased's sons, beating their chests and rolling in grief before the grave. The essence of these performances was not sorrow but display: proving to neighbors that the family was filial, that the funeral had been carried out with appropriate grandeur, that the deceased had departed in dignity.

📝 Curator's Note
The logic of Taiwan's traditional funeral was not "how to face death" but "how to display to the living your manner of facing death." The commotion was for the living to see, not for the dead to hear. Understanding this is necessary before you can understand how radical the quiet revolution that followed would be.

The Twilight of the Bone Gatherer

After burial came one more procedure: bone gathering. Years after the deceased was interred, families would hire a "bone gatherer" (or jiǎngǔ shī) to open the coffin, gather the remains piece by piece, clean them, rearrange them in an urn, and then, on an auspicious date, reinter them in a more favorable feng shui location. The bone gatherer profession had existed for centuries, with craft passed from father to son, master to apprentice — each of the 206 bones in a human body memorized by name⁶.

But this trade is disappearing.

In the 1970s, the Taiwanese government began promoting cremation, citing public health and land scarcity. At first the push was slow — the idea of being "buried in the ground for peace" was deeply ingrained, and many families preferred spending large sums on burial plots rather than cremating their loved ones. Yet half a century later, the numbers tell the whole story: the national cremation rate reached 92.83% in 2014 and climbed to 98.7% by 2019⁷. The number of burial interments shrank from tens of thousands per year to 5,752 in 2021.

✦ "Fifty years ago, the bone gatherer walked into every graveyard. Today, they walk into oral history projects at museums."

What overturned an island's view of life and death? The answer was not a single factor but the layering of three forces: urbanization, religious transformation, and regulatory push. In Taipei, land is as precious as gold — the price of a burial plot could buy a studio apartment. When land became a luxury, the belief in "buried in the ground finds peace" began to waver — not that people stopped believing, but that they could no longer afford to believe.

From Columbaria to a Spot Beneath a Tree

After cremation replaced burial, cremated remains needed somewhere to go. Columbaria (niche towers) became the new form of interment. Public niches cost one to two hundred thousand NT dollars; private ones ranged from three hundred thousand to tens of millions. The floor level, orientation, and "feng shui" of a niche became a new source of anxiety, and some private columbaria were even hyped as investment vehicles⁸. Taipei's public columbarium occupancy has exceeded ninety percent and is approaching saturation.

The spatial problem of death did not disappear with cremation — it only moved from the ground surface into buildings.

In 2001, the Ministry of the Interior began promoting "eco-natural burial." The Funeral and Cremation Management Act passed in 2002 was the first to codify tree burial, flower burial, and sea burial into law; it also established a funeral director licensing system, attempting to professionalize an industry long considered to operate in murky territory⁹.

At first, change came extremely slowly. In 2006, only about two hundred people nationwide chose an eco-burial.

But the turning point came faster than expected. In 2007, Taipei City opened "Yongli Park" as a tree burial zone — 1.2 hectares of greenery planted with 13 species of trees. After cremation, ashes are ground to powder and interred in a hole beside tree roots; no headstones are placed, no names recorded; after ten years the ashes fully decompose, and the same spot can be used again¹⁰. Master Shengyan's 2009 eco-burial brought the concept into mainstream awareness.

From that point, numbers began to climb: in 2017, nationwide eco-burials reached 9,135 — surpassing burial interments of 7,779 for the first time, a historic crossover point¹¹. By 2021, eco-burials exceeded 18,000. By the end of 2023, more than 140,000 people nationwide had chosen eco-burial.

📝 Curator's Note
Taiwan's pace of eco-burial adoption ranks among the fastest in Asia. The 2017 "eco-burial surpasses burial" crossover is a milestone that few noticed — it means that the number of people willing to "disappear" has already exceeded the number holding out for a headstone.

In Taipei, tree burial accounts for 57% of eco-burials, flower burial 41%, and sea burial only 2%. The low proportion of sea burial is unsurprising: even among those who accept the concept of "returning to nature," most Taiwanese families still want somewhere they can "go and visit" — even if that place is only a tree.

The Price and Dignity of Death

⚠️ Contested Perspective
Eco-burial in Taipei is entirely free of charge, and some counties and cities even offer an incentive of ten to twenty thousand NT dollars. But critics point out that behind the free-of-charge policy is the government using economic incentives to change cultural habits; for economically disadvantaged families, "choosing eco-burial" may not be entirely a shift in values — it may simply be that a traditional funeral is unaffordable.

A traditional Taiwanese funeral can cost anywhere from over a hundred thousand to over a million NT dollars. Funeral companies, religious ceremonies, flowers, venues, hearses, columbarium niches — every step is commercialized. The funeral industry's annual output is estimated to exceed NT$20 billion. The 2002 Funeral and Cremation Management Act introduced the funeral director licensing system, requiring businesses of a certain scale to employ professional funeral directors in an attempt to improve this long under-regulated industry¹².

But reform is not limited to the institutional level. National Nanhua University professor of death studies Yang Guozhu has observed that younger generations are changing their attitudes toward funerals: "It's not that they're unfilial — it's that their definition of 'filial' is different."¹³ The older generation considered grandeur to be filial piety; the newer generation leans toward "respecting the wishes the deceased expressed while alive." Starting in 2026, four municipalities — Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, and Taichung — opened pre-registration for eco-burial, allowing people to determine their posthumous arrangements while still living¹⁴.

This is a subtle power transfer: the decision-making authority over death is moving from the family to the individual.

The Quiet Evolution of Qingming Festival

Every year in early April, millions of Taiwanese people return to cemeteries and columbaria to burn incense, lay flowers, and clear away weeds. Qingming Festival is the moment of the largest collective facing-of-death on this island.

But Qingming itself is also changing. In 2017, grave visits across Taiwan triggered 1,936 fires; by 2022, that number had fallen to 997 — fewer and fewer people burn paper money, while more and more bring fresh flowers and vegetarian offerings¹⁵. Some counties and cities have promoted "online memorial" platforms, allowing children who cannot return home to light a virtual stick of incense on a screen.

From the deafening music on electric flower cars to families quietly scattering ashes at Yongli Park and then turning to leave — Taiwan's relationship with death is moving from "displaying for the living to see" toward "allowing the deceased to depart quietly."

Lee Ji-ping, president of the R.O.C. Death Studies Association, has identified four obstacles to eco-burial promotion: the Confucian tradition of preferring burial, families' psychological need for "a place to go," the reality that funerals are family rather than individual decisions, and the commercial interests of funeral industry operators¹⁶. These four walls are being breached one by one — but at different speeds.

✦ "Master Shengyan said cremated ashes are just carbon. But for many Taiwanese families, that small urn of ash is the last way to hold that person."

By the end of 2023, more than 140,000 people nationwide had chosen eco-burial. 140,000 names disappeared into soil, into the sea, into flower beds. They chose to leave no trace — in a culture that spent centuries building gravestones, this may be the quietest revolution of all.

Further Reading

• Taiwan's Religious and Temple Culture — How folk belief influences funeral customs
• Taiwan's Weddings, Funerals, and Life Rites — The full spectrum of ritual, from birth to death
• Taiwan's Environmental Justice and NIMBY Disputes — Social conflicts over incinerator and cemetery site selection

References