Paper Short Abstract:

This paper ethnographically depicts and analyzes the speculative market in columbaria niches in Hong Kong and Macau and interprets how the problem of whether one believes in ghosts, or whether one believes that other people believes in ghosts, affects the market.

Paper Abstract:

In many Chinese contexts, the terms Yin and Yang are used to compare graves for the dead to homes for the living. Yin residences are homes for the dead while Yang residences are for the living. In Hong Kong, multi-story columbaria, with thousands of niches on each floor, are compared to high-rise apartment buildings, where neighbors hardly know one another. In mainland China, some people used to purchase gravesites in advance, because the price for gravesites rose regularly. But now the law labels such purchases a type of “illegal real estate speculation.” But in Macau, privately built columbaria openly market columbaria niches as a form speculative commodity. The niches can be resold at any time and the rights to the niches supposedly last forever no matter who owns them. One can place one’s ancestors’ ashes in a niche for a period and then remove them and resell the niche. Or one can keep the niche empty in anticipation of a future price rise, before reselling. In the mainland, such speculation would not only be illegal, but might also prove unprofitable, because many people fear that a second-hand columbaria niche would be haunted by the ghost of its previous occupant. This paper examines the factors that people consider when speculating in columbaria niches, both in the views of sales people and in ghost stories that circulate online. A driving question will be: how does speculation about future profits proceed alongside dynamics of haunting from the past?