China Experiencing Shortage of Coffins and Urns

Mourners gather outside memorial halls for the deceased at a funeral home in Shanghai, China, on Dec. 31, 2022. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Manufacturers of coffins, urns, and other funeral supplies in China said they are experiencing an unprecedented shortage.

The Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times recently learned of the shortage from inquiries to multiple urn and coffin manufacturers.

Coffins Out of Stock

A netizen from Zhejiang, an eastern coastal province of China, revealed in a post on Jan. 12 that at their company’s Lunar New Year party, everyone was talking about the recently deceased elderly at home, the long waiting list for cremation, and the collapsed funeral industry. “Several [company] leaders have to keep their parents’ bodies at home before cremation,” said the post.

The Epoch Times made several calls on Jan. 18 and 19 to Chinese manufacturers of cremation furnaces and coffins and learned that they were out of stock.

A manufacturer surnamed Zhao in Jiangxi, a province in east China, said there’s no cremation machine in stock, and it is impossible to estimate when it will be available even after placing the order. “It can’t be produced,” he said.

A man surnamed Zuo, who manufactures cremation coffins in the coastal Shandong Province, said, “we will ship 17 cargo containers today,” and that’s about what they have left.

Zero Urn Inventory

A number of urn makers have answered the request in the same manner: It’s out of stock, and the factories will resume production after the Lunar New Year. The earliest estimate to ship an order would be a month later.

A Zhejiang urn manufacturer surnamed Qiu said it is unprecedented, and he’s not sure when orders will be delivered.

“The pandemic has hit like a storm. There are no urns,” he said.

A woman surnamed Sun, a jade and wooden urn manufacturer in the central province of Henan, said that there was massive demand. “The inventory is nearly all gone,” she said. The production cycle is about a month, and any new order now will not be filled until late February, according to Sun.

Family members of the deceased line up for the cremation procedures at a funeral home in Shanghai, China on Jan. 04, 2023. Wang Gang/ Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images

A ceramic urn wholesaler in east China, Jiangxi Province, said the production can’t catch up with the orders.

“Frankly, there are too many deaths,” the owner, surnamed Chu, said. Her products are mainly middle to low-end urns at a price range of 200 yuan to 400 yuan ($29.48 to $58.96).

It is impossible to estimate the overall sales volume, she said. “Customers now order large quantities, and some dealers want to stock up.”

She emphasized that it’s not about the money, but “they are completely out of stock. The factories worked overtime before the Lunar New Year, but the production couldn’t catch up with the demand.”

The factory won’t resume production until Feb. 6, after the Lantern Festival, Chu said.

Cover-up of COVID Deaths

It is widely understood that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been manipulating data since its founding. The true COVID-related death toll will probably forever remain a top secret to the CCP.

The CCP alleges a total death of 10.14 million for the year 2021. The official report also gave other details: There were 7,043 cremation furnaces nationwide, and 5.966 million corpses were cremated throughout the year, with a cremation rate of 58.8 percent.

According to the official data released on Jan. 17, the total number of deaths in 2022 was estimated to be 10.41 million. What the data did not reveal this time was the cremation rate.

Based on the data provided, that says in 2021, each cremation furnace only cremated an average of 2.3 bodies per day.

In December 2022, Baoxing funeral home in Shanghai told The Epoch Times that they were burning 400 to 500 bodies a day, up from the maximum of 90 before the pandemic restrictions were lifted.

While a staff member at the Nanhui funeral parlor in Shanghai told The Epoch Times that they have six cremators that are operating every day and said “[If you] send the body now, [you] need to wait at least a week. It will not be cremated until the third day of the Chinese New Year.”

The CCP figures show a stark contrast to what Chinese locals recount and videos and images posted online since China’s COVID-19 surge in December 2022. According to netizens, families of the deceased raced to funeral homes in Suzhou at 6 a.m. just to get in line for a cremation service reservation. A video taken outside the funeral home in Chongming Island, Shanghai, showed long queues of hearses waiting on the road for the next cremation service. In other videos and online accounts on social media, funeral parlors were so overloaded that corpses were left directly on the ground.

Lin Cenxin and Chang Chun contributed to this report.