Roundup Newswires

Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network

Hong Kong real estate now more expensive for the dead than the living

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Admin

A tiny nook for an urn can cost up to £180,000. With 200,000 sets of ashes waiting for a resting place, the city is running out of options

“Per square foot, it has become more expensive to house the dead than the living,” says Kwok Hoi Pong, chairman of the Hong Kong Funeral Business Association. “A niche for an urn in a private columbarium in the best position can cost up to HK$1.8m. This is the phenomenon in Hong Kong.”

A ground burial plot can cost anywhere between HK$3m (£300,000) and HK$5m, but in the city’s congested cemeteries, vacancies rarely become available. Land is so scarce that 90% of the 48,000 people a year who die in Hong Kong are cremated. But increasingly finding the space even to store ashes is becoming nigh on impossible.

It took more than a decade to explain the sudden death of my precious teenage son | Karen Gardner

Posted on February 22, 2019 by Admin

Although I wasn’t aware of feeling responsible, the lifting of a sense of heavy burden indicates otherwise

Sitting in the cardiologist’s rooms, awaiting the results of a genetic test that might explain the sudden death of my eldest child, I could not then have imagined the impact on my world of what was to come.

It’s 14 years since Tom died one sunny summer day, but my quest to find a plausible explanation never subsided and I never got used to not knowing why, as I had to get used to living without him.