A Niche Market
Photo by Eric Hunt via Flickr.
HONG Kong, with far too little space, is facing a serious shortage of niches – tiny, locker-like spaces which contain the ashes of the dead and serve as a place for families to visit and remember their ancestors. Governments say that 50,000 new spaces will be needed over the next twenty years. Given that columbaria are lined from floor to ceiling with niches, and that no-one wants a columbarium near their house for reasons of superstition, convenience and cleanliness, it’s a difficult feat to house the dead. The cost for a single niche – crammed in with countless others – is estimated to range from £250 to £15,000.
That the problem remains unsolved is surprising given Hong Kong’s reputation as a modern city defined by pragmatism and efficiency, but less so for those who know the city and its superstitious side intimately. Most residential buildings, when numbering their floors, skip floors four and 14 and so on because the Cantonese word for the number four sounds (vaguely!) like “death”. In one rich suburb, a major apartment block has a massive hole in the middle to give the local dragon living behind the building access to the sea. It is not uncommon for feng shui or divination to cause relocations.
Hong Kong hit a breaking point with niches after officials discovered an unlicensed underground columbaria with a capacity of 12,000 niches. Now, the city has launched a scheme to regulate licensing more heavily and seize such illegal projects. Other parts of China, too, are beginning to see opportunity in the business of providing niches to wealthy Hong Kongers, even though most Hong Kongers would prefer to see their dead rest locally. It seems that Hong Kong’s age-old problem of lack of space is one that goes beyond the grave.
