Soaring price for increasingly scarce burial plots are raising eyebrows across the city.

A new kind of Shanghai real estate investment

The price of Shanghai burial plots have shot up over the past year, with the most expensive spaces going for a reported RMB 50,000 per square meter, far more than some local real estate, where the average was RMB 19,216 per square meter in March, according to a report on online news outlet Sohu.

The RMB 50,000 per square meter price tag doesn’t begin to factor additional fees like maintenance, the tombstones or graveyard certification.

With the cost of land in Shanghai is already more than most living can afford, so burial space is quickly becoming the ultimately luxury for the dead.

To help the poor afford burials in Shanghai, the Shanghai Bureau of Civil Affairs is taking on the issue, and in late 2010 set aside a total of 25,000 square meters of land to be used to build cemeteries for Shanghai’s low-income groups.

According to Wang Hongjie from Shanghai funeral industry council, a single grave in these areas will costs less than RMB 1,000.

The increase in prices is directly related to scarcity of land in Shanghai.

The city has a population of about 23 million people living on slightly more than 6,100 square kilometers of land, according to Channel News Asia. With numbers like these, every square meter counts, especially in cemetaries.

According to cemetery officials in the same news report, about 100,000 people die every year in Shanghai. If the rate continues unchanged and current cemetary land isn't augmented, the city will run out of room to bury its dead in a decade.

"A tomb crisis is coming if people continue to ignore this, and land burial will turn into a big problem one day," warned Chen Rong Hua, vice general manager of the Binghai Guyuan Cemetery.

In efforts to deal with the cramped quarters in local cemeteries, the city government is starting to push sea burials. Shanghai was the first city in China to offer the option 20 years ago, but it never caught on.

Today city officials are hoping that -- with the right incentives -- people will give the policy a second chance.

To encourage more local sea burials the city is increasing the subsidies for those who choose to have their ashes scattered at sea.

There were only 287 sea burials when Shanghai first offered it in 1991, but by the end of 2010, about 2,100 took the city up on the option.

But this is still not enough to address the shortage of land for burials.

One reason some commentators give in State media reports for the practice of sea burials is the lack of a place for people to honor the memories of ancestors for Tomb Sweeping Day.

Skipping the lines and going online for Qingming Jie

For many of China’s young, Internet-loving generation who have graves to visit this April 5 (Qingming Jie or Tomb Sweeping Day), they’re trying to skip the crowds at cemeteries and are going online to pay their respects.

Virtual tomb sweeping websites have been popping up since last year, one the leading ones being Wangshangsaomu.com

The sites allow users to conduct a variety of rituals including presenting bouquets of flowers, offering incense, lighting white candles and plating trees -- all without leaving their chairs, or fighting the long lines at local bus and train stations.

The new form or remembrance has triggered a bit of controversy though, with online mourning critics arguing that the most effective way to keep traditions alive is to set aside time in our schedules to physically go and sweeping tombs. They say that online services will only commercialize the the Qingming Jie tradition.