Lavish funerals in vogue in SE Asian societies

BEIJING - More and more people in Southeast Asian countries now want to give their dead relatives a “lavish” funeral, the best that money can buy.

From gold-plated coffins to burial plots that cost a million dollars, a number of rich people are helping make the passage to the afterlife a grand affair for their dead kin.

“Our clients tell us their loved ones deserve the best in life and in death,” said Au Kok Huei, an official in Malaysia’s NV Multi-Corporation Berhad, a bereavement services provider.

The company offers a range of funeral services and runs cemeteries in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Taiwan, the Shanghai Daily reported.

Its 100,000 clients are mainly ethnic Chinese who make up more than 40 million of Southeast Asia’s population.

Company officials said demand for luxury funerals among the ethnic Chinese has been growing especially in Indonesia, which has a small but affluent Chinese population and in Singapore, where the company runs a $22 million vault for burial urns.

Among the popular products currently in vogue are a burial urn crafted from Canadian jade priced at $60,750 and a gold-plated coffin at $125,500.

The company’s most expensive burial plots are on hilltops, and each plot costs $517,000.

Wealthy customers usually purchase several adjacent plots for their family members, the company said.

Hong Kong’s Sino-Life Group Ltd is also a funeral service provider.

Kong Hon Kong, who founded the company 20 years ago, said the idea to set up the company came after he was asked to manage the funeral of a relative.

“Local cemeteries were poorly run and eerie, so I thought, ‘why can’t we manage a cemetery like a garden so our children will want to visit us after we pass away’?”

The aim led him to design a memorial park near Kuala Lumpur, currently the largest in Southeast Asia.

Designed to resemble a recreational park, the sprawling 327-hectare facility features burial plots divided according to respective religious beliefs.

The dead buried at the memorial now aren’t limited only to humans.

A section is dedicated to cats and dogs, with over 100 burial plots costing $1,600 each.