Recently, the 35th Anniversary Ceremony of Burial at Sea sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau was solemnly held to pay respect and remembrance to the citizens who chose to be buried at sea over the past 35 years. Since the sea burial service was launched in 1991, Shanghai has escorted nearly 100,000 ancestors to have their ashes buried at sea, and more than 340,000 family members participated in farewell activities.
In 2025, the number of sea burials with ashes in Shanghai exceeded 10,000 for the first time, setting a record high. Among them, residents from the Yangtze River Delta region participated in more than 1,000 cases. Shanghai has become one of the cities with the largest scale of sea burials in the country.
Burial at sea in Shanghai has been steadily promoted, benefiting from the continued improvement of policy guarantees.The city established a sea burial subsidy in 1999, and the standard was gradually raised from the initial 150 yuan/case to 3,000 yuan/case.
In 2025, Shanghai issued documents such as the "Opinions on Actively Promoting Sea Burial Services for Cremated Ashes" and "Notice on Improving the City's Funeral and Burial Policies to Benefit the People" to provide comprehensive support for sea burials in terms of service supply, process standardization, subsidy optimization, and mechanism improvement.
Relevant documents also stipulate that starting from January 1, 2026, for deceased persons who are not registered in the city and are cremated in Shanghai, the undertakers will choose ecological burial methods such as collective sea burials without bearing the relevant expenses themselves. At present, there are more than 150 reservations for sea burials of eligible deceased persons who are not registered in this city.
