Wang Dan is a genial 34-year-old man with a soft, bulldog-like face and a quiet enthusiasm for the next thing coming. His heroes were forged in garages, dorm rooms and cheap flats. They are the Chinese strivers who have transformed Beijing into a city of startup dreams – entrepreneurs such as Robin Li, who rose from peasant roots to found the search giant Baidu, and Jack Ma, the former English teacher who founded the internet trading company Alibaba. Now, they’re both worth billions. Wang was inspired by their stories. They taught him to think big.

Wang’s own creation myth began in a Beijing hospital in early 2012. After doctors diagnosed his mother with cancer, Wang paid a vast sum to secure her a bed at the Beijing Cancer hospital, perhaps the city’s finest. Weeks became months, and Wang’s mother underwent 17 rounds of chemotherapy. She deflated like a balloon – 5kg down, then 10, then 20. Seeing his mother suffer, Wang grew depressed. He lost his confidence. He lost weight. He worried he might lose his job as a marketing director at Lashou, a Beijing-based online company. His mother’s sickness was like a powerful lens, focusing his frustrations – the city’s choking air pollution, his own stagnating career – into a single, stinging beam.

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Eventually, a doctor recommended that Wang begin “making preparations”. Wang quit his job. Like most of his generation, he was born under China’s one-child policy, and with no siblings, he forced himself to begin planning for his mother’s death. A hospital worker recommended that he call the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the city’s best-known resting place. An employee picked up the phone. “Where’s the body?” she asked. Wang said that his mother was still alive, though she could pass away at any moment. The employee put him on hold, and after a few minutes, another picked up. “Where’s the body?” he asked. Wang gave him the same answer. “Then why are you in such a rush?” he said. Wang hung up and returned to his mother.

A few hours later, Wang tried a different tack. He crossed the highway abutting the hospital and stopped beneath the vast concrete hull of an elevated railway line, where a row of funeral services shops stood as filthy and forlorn as slum brothels. Wang picked one at random, and walked inside. It was dusk, and a single lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The shopkeeper had a deep tan, a tuft of Brillo-like hair and a thick, unplaceable accent. He asked Wang a few cursory questions, and then demanded a £300 deposit. “What’s the money for?” Wang asked. The man smiled, revealing a mouth full of yellow teeth. “You just give me the money, and I’ll take care of everything,” he replied. Wang nodded and backed out through the door.

“When he looked at me, it felt as if he was looking at a piece of meat,” Wang recalled. “It just gave me this terrible feeling.” He visited another shop on the street, then a third, and each made his skin crawl. “I thought, in such a modern society, why would this industry be so primitive and weird?”

* * *

Later that week, Wang called his friend Xu Yi, and asked him out to dinner. The two had got to know each other a decade earlier while working at ChinaByte, China’s first tech news website. That evening in October 2012, they met at a hotpot restaurant near Xu’s flat, just south of the city’s central business district. They hadn’t seen each other in months, but had no trouble reconnecting. Both men were proudly overweight. Both grew up in Beijing, and felt most comfortable expressing themselves with the raw, guttural force of the local dialect. Neither was religious, but both wore Buddhist prayer beads around their left wrists in the style of heavyset middle-aged men across the country. Wang affectionately called his friend “Old Xu” – Xu was nearly a decade older, and shared a Beijing flat with his wife, a journalist at a state-run arts magazine. Wang was single, and lived with his father. That day, Old Xu paid the bill.

Both men felt that they needed a fresh start. Shortly after their dinner, Wang called Xu again, and eventually, they began to meet up a few times a week. Over the previous few years, Wang had founded a couple of small online businesses, but none had taken off, and he was keen to try again. In 2007 he had visited San Francisco, where a college friend invited him to lunch at Google’s Mountain View campus. It was a formative experience. He spent the day traversing Google’s pristine, colourful hallways, watching its employees play basketball and pamper their dogs. “This is it. This is what I want,” he thought to himself.

Over time, Wang began peppering Xu with business ideas, most of which related to his mother. They could open a plus-sized geriatric clothing store, he thought. Or a social network for the elderly. But China’s elderly were hard to reach, he realised. They “play mahjong, or hang out in the park, but they don’t really go online”, Wang told me. Still, whatever they ended up doing, Wang felt that he and Xu would make a good team. While Wang exuded warmth, Xu offered a hard-edged competence cultivated over 20 years as a bank teller, a mid-level manager at Lee Cooper denim, and most recently, the CEO of a web-based pharmaceuticals firm.

In March 2013, something clicked: Wang would have to inter his mother eventually, and he decided that he and Xu could do it better than the hucksters and faceless bureaucrats he’d dealt with in the autumn. Wang had found his business idea, although its contours were still hazy. He had studied the Silicon Valley mode of disruptive innovation, and envisioned a clear path to considerable wealth: identify a sclerotic, backward-looking industry, and harness the sleek, subversive power of the internet to trump its services at lower costs. The bigger the industry, he thought – and the deeper its problems – the greater his potential gains. Robin Li changed the way that people in China gathered information; Jack Ma changed the way they shopped; Wang and Xu would change the way they buried their loved ones. Xu was at first baffled by the idea, but he trusted his friend’s enthusiasm, and after a week of canvassing friends, agreed to do some research.

At their next meeting, Wang and Xu rolled out a map of Beijing and split the city in half at Tiananmen Square. Wang took the east side, and Xu took the west. “Then, we walked,” Xu recalled. “We went to all of the hospitals, to the funeral parlours, to the cemeteries, to the nursing homes.” They recorded prices and counted customers. In the still hours before dawn, they filed into the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery to observe the funerals of strangers. Wang visited about 15 times, his face fixed into a mask of grief, until one morning, a baffled security guard asked him how many people in his family had died. They collected information for two and a half months. Then, they crunched numbers.

In Beijing, they learned, nearly 100,000 people die each year, and the number is rising rapidly. In the next 15 years, China’s elderly population will probably grow by 100 million. Their children – the expanding cohort of white-collar professionals, who were born under the one-child policy – have never had more money to spend, and one way they’re spending it is on funerals: cremation boxes, wreaths, feng shui assessments, auspicious plots in reputable cemeteries. The demographic crunch – so many old people, comparatively few young people – could be cataclysmic for China’s economy, but it will spell potentially huge profits for Beijing’s mortuaries, cemeteries, and 3,000 or so funeral goods stores, most of them as strange and disquieting as the shops Wang encountered beneath the elevated rail line.

In Beijing, 100,000 people die each year, and the number is rising rapidly, spelling huge profits for funeral shops

Wang and Xu’s investigation was like a jigsaw puzzle, and as the pieces began to form a complete picture, they were shocked by what they saw. Xu prepared to quit his job at the pharmaceuticals firm. They had stumbled on a gold mine, Wang thought. All they needed was the courage to lower themselves into its depths.

* * *

Human beings care deeply about mortal remains. Traditionally, Catholics bury their dead in cemeteries; Chinook tribes of the Pacific north-west send them off in canoes; Tibetan Buddhists place them on mountaintops to be devoured by birds. But “no one just throws the dead away, as far as we can tell”, says Thomas Laqueur, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of a forthcoming cultural history of death. Why, he says, is a difficult question. It’s not a matter of belief, per se; it’s something less conscious. Deep down, most of us believe that the dead remain somehow alive.

China has long been obsessed with ghosts. According to ancient folklore, ghosts not only inhabited the land of the living, they controlled it. Contented ghosts could bring bumper crops; indignant ghosts could bring famine. People went to great lengths to please the dead, burying them with items that they would need in the afterlife – ersatz money, clothing, tools. Peasants might be buried with a few crude wooden models; the elite were buried with gold and jade. (Other traditions emerged across China. On the Loess plateau, for instance – a vast, dusty plain on the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River – villagers often joined deceased, unmarried men and women in “ghost marriages”; the graveside nuptials allowed both families to reap the economic benefits of marriage while granting the couple companionship after death.)

In 1949, Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China and declared war on ghosts. He branded traditional funerary rites as “feudal superstition” and burials a waste of arable land. In 1956, he circulated a petition entitled “A call to bring in cremation”. He replaced the funeral with the “memorial meeting”, a rushed affair which culminated in a speech by the head of the deceased’s “work unit” – an agricultural collective, a factory, a hospital – praising his contributions to socialism.

Mao died in 1976, and two years later, Deng Xiaoping came to power, opening China to the outside world. Although Mao’s “memorial meetings” remained in form, the country’s nouveaux riches began to augment them with the more lavish trappings of traditional ceremonies. They bought jade cremation boxes, elaborate floral wreaths, catered services, professional mourners – testaments to individual wealth among widespread poverty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Babaoshan Cemetery in Beijing, where high-ranking Communist party members are interred. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix for the Guardian

In the years that followed, China went from being one of the world’s most equal societies to one of its least. Communist authorities, still ostensibly Marxist, found themselves in a bind – they could no longer credibly discourage the pursuit of personal fortune, so they tried to limit its public expression. They issued China’s first funeral-related legislation in 1985, commanding citizens to “reject superstitious funerary customs and advocate frugal and reasonable ones”. But even at the very top, the rules were selectively enforced. Mao himself was embalmed and laid in a vast mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, where his jaundiced corpse remains a tourist attraction.

In the late 2000s, as social media websites became popular in China, excessive funerals became a focus of the public’s growing intolerance for rampant inequality. In 2011, five brothers in the eastern city Wenling spent about £500,000 to send off their mother in front of a crowd of 10,000 mourners, with a line of gold cannons and a fleet of Lincoln limousines. After the photos went viral online, the Wenling authorities fined the family, and sacked a handful of complicit officials.

But that didn’t stop the boom. In 2013, the market research firm Euromonitor reported that China’s death industry was growing by 17% a year. From 2003 to 2012, as cemetery real estate dwindled, grave prices in Beijing rose 15-fold, according to the state-run Beijing News – in some choice graveyards, to £35,000 per square metre. Members of China’s emerging middle class began to save money so that a parent’s death wouldn’t entail financial ruin. Chinese internet users coined new terms to describe the burden of burying their loved ones, including fennu, or “grave slave” and sibuqi, or “can’t afford to die”.

The Communist party controls hospitals, crematoria, morgues and cemeteries, but leaves them to make their own profits

As Wang and Xu began to investigate China’s death industry, they found that although the Communist party controls virtually all of the country’s hospitals, crematoria, morgues and cemeteries, it leaves these institutions to make their own profits – and in the absence of free-market competition, corruption proliferates. When a person dies, hospital aides harass the bereaved like souvenir sellers at a market. They compete over who will guide the grieving relative to a small, privately owned shop to buy funeral supplies – shrouds, flowers, cremation boxes and urns. Then, the shop owner gives them a cut of the sales. Kickbacks continue down the line, and bodies become a kind of currency. Mortuary directors buy them from ambulance drivers. Crematorium managers buy them from mortuary directors. Cemetery managers buy them from crematoriums. The same government departments that ostensibly regulate this chain of interests also reap its rewards in taxes, kickbacks and sales of cemetery land. According to the Beijing News, the city’s residents spend an average of 80,000 yuan per burial – about £8,300, which is more than many citizens earn in a year.

Wang and Xu had studied the law surrounding the funeral industry, and understood the obstacles they faced. The rules were harsh and unbending. As private sector entrepreneurs, they could not become undertakers in the traditional sense. They couldn’t embalm, cremate, bury or apply makeup to the recently deceased. They couldn’t open a crematorium, a morgue or a cemetery – but they could open a funeral service shop, not unlike the ones Wang encountered in his first brush with the death industry.

Wang wanted to do something that he’d never seen done before – he wanted to move the industry online. A customer would log on to his company’s website, and peruse its offerings. He and Xu would sell well-built, fairly priced cremation boxes, floral wreaths and shrouds. Their customers would order consultations – and they would visit those customers’ homes, ready to guide them through the entire interment process, from grief counselling to cremation to arranging an inheritance. Maybe they would open a physical store; maybe they wouldn’t. But more importantly, they “would very quickly help customers find the absolute cheapest, best service”, Wang said. They would be radically transparent, refusing to pay kickbacks to other institutions. And that would be only the beginning – they would expand to other cities, organise workshops for relatives of paediatric cancer patients, invest in educational programmes to chip away at the deeply rooted taboos surrounding death.

Early on, Xu told me that he burned to lead a tupoxing, or “disruptive” operation, one that would force the rest of the industry to either adapt or risk irrelevance. I asked if he was concerned that, at some point, the government would shut him down. He smiled, and shrugged. “We‘re just the little guys,” he said. “If the government is threatened by us, well, that means we’re succeeding.”

* * *

Starting out, Wang and Xu’s problems were straightforward: they had no inventory, no suppliers, no store, no staff, no customers and no experience. Gathering inventory seemed like a low-risk way to start. They searched online for funerary product wholesalers and ordered small boxes of samples. Within days, they began to feel as if the entire internet was out to cheat them. They paid for top-shelf items and received half-empty boxes of shrouds, cremation boxes without lids, fragments of broken statuary.

So they decided to cut out the middleman. They found their destinations online: places such as Liudaokou in Tianjin, a municipality east of Beijing, and Xiong county in Hebei, a poor northern province – the cradles of China’s funeral industry, where the artefacts of death are made and sold. All at once, their lives became a blur of rough-and-tumble villages. Most were more depressing than macabre, just low-lying warrens of tiny factories and family-owned shops. The most remote villages seemed half-empty. The men had moved to the cities to work, leaving their wives to sell cremation boxes as they bounced their children on their laps. Wang and Xu would haggle to buy as much as they could carry; neither owned a car, so they’d haul their keep across fields and onboard bumpy, smoke-spewing buses back to the capital.

Next, Wang began building a website, while Xu attempted to get used to the presence of mortal remains. By custom, if Wang and Xu sold shrouds, they would have to fit them onto the dead, often just a few hours after their passing, with the body still lying on a hospital bed. (Mortuaries would deal with cosmetics and the rest.) For Xu, preparing inventory was nothing compared with the prospect of handling a corpse. His wife would lay still as he practised stripping her naked and scrubbing her down – first with hot water, then with alcohol – and then, carefully, dressing her in undergarments and in the ornate silk clothes of the dead. When he got clumsy, she’d open her eyes and slap his wrist, and they’d laugh themselves into knots.

They called the business Fallen Leaves and opened a one-room shop near a hospital in the city’s southern sprawl – they decided that having an actual storefront would help their credibility. They slathered the interior – the shelves, the cabinets, the ceiling – in brilliant white paint. “We wanted to make it look cleaner than those other stores,” Xu recalled. “We didn’t have any design experience. So we figured ‘clean’ was the most important thing for us.” They laid their cremation boxes out carefully along the shelves, and priced them at cost. In March, 2013, they hired their first employee – a former colleague of Xu’s – to man the store in their absence.

Their first customer was a local middle-aged woman. Her father had died of lung cancer, and she found Fallen Leaves online. Wang and Xu travelled to the hospital together, put on a brave face for the woman, then cringed when they saw the corpse, lying supine in an adjacent room. The cancer had spread to his liver, and his skin was “as yellow as a banana”, Wang recalled. Xu approached the body slowly and sat him upright, to scrub his back. The corpse then exhaled – a quick phuh from deep within his lungs. Xu jumped back and screamed. “I nearly threw him off the table,” he told me. Wang, a few paces removed, remained calm – he knew that air could remain inside the lungs after death. “This happened to my grandfather,” he told me. “I saw it. I was about 20 years old. It was really, really scary.” When Xu regained his composure, they dressed the corpse in a shroud, looked him over, and realised they’d forgotten to put on his underwear. So they began again.

Gradually, throughout late 2012 and early 2013, they established a routine. Xu ordered and organised their stock – mostly cremation boxes and shrouds – and met customers. Wang, meanwhile, met investors, at first seeking advice on growth, and later, modest investments to expand the company’s staff. “He’s like the father, and I’m like the mother,” Xu told me. “I make sure our house is in order.”

Both men quickly began to grasp the social costs of working in the death industry. They decided to keep the truth from their parents. Although Wang’s mother had bucked the doctors’ predictions and was now living at home again, her condition remained fragile. When Wang’s father, a hardened factory man, eventually heard about the business from Wang’s friends, he slapped his son across the face. “He said, ‘your mother’s health is really bad, why would you do something so … inauspicious’,” Wang told me. Wang spent months mending the relationship. Both Wang and Xu began noticing a peculiar phenomenon – they’d reach out to acquaintances on WeChat, a popular messaging app, and their messages would bounce. They were being blocked.

The website that Wang had developed allowed customers to order items online, and occasionally, he delivered their purchases himself. One night in April 2013, he delivered a cremation box to a middle-aged woman in southern Beijing. She answered the door in a nightgown. “What do you want?” she asked. Wang handed her the cremation box, and she panicked. Nobody in her family had died. Was this a prank? Was it a warning? Wang was dumbstruck; he spent 20 minutes trying to calm her down. “You’re lucky my husband wasn’t home,” she told him. “He would’ve knocked you out.” Back at the office, Wang reviewed the order, found her name, address and phone number to be accurate, and disabled the website’s e-commerce function. “There were two possibilities,” he said. “Either somebody wanted to play a trick on her, or somebody wanted to play a trick on me.” That month, Fallen Leaves grossed 10,000 yuan (£1,042), only a fraction of what they’d spent building inventory.

Then Wang got his first big break. A former colleague at Lashou introduced him to an employee at one of Beijing’s hottest investment firms, Zhen Fund. She invited him to give a pitch. The firm’s directors, Xu Xiaoping and Wang Qiang, had made their fortune founding New Oriental, one of the world’s largest education companies; they became early-stage startup backers in 2011 and quickly acquired an air of gatekeepers. Wang met them on a sunny day in July 2013 at their fifth-floor office in the China World Trade Center, a shimmering glass and steel skyscraper in the centre of Beijing.

Wang sat at the head of a long table in front of the investors and took a deep breath. He reminded himself that there were reasons to feel optimistic. “They were fat, like me,” he recalled. They were also named Xu and Wang. They seemed willing to take risks – Zhen Fund had backed “over 150 high-growth companies”, according to its website. He began his pitch with the by now well-honed story of his mother – the hospital, the salesman, the calls, the investigation.

Wang was intimidated. But as his story continued, it dawned on him that the investors were rapt, studying him with wide-eyed, inquiring expressions. Before he could finish, they began peppering him with questions about his business plans, about his profit margins, about his mother, about a documentary Wang Qiang had recently seen about a cemetery in Paris. After two hours of talk, Xu Xiaoping gave Wang a fleshy handshake and promised him £65,000 in seed funding. “I was moved by his courage,” Xu Xiaoping told me. Wang left the building and immediately called Xu – both men were ecstatic – then found a nearby restaurant and gorged himself on beers and barbecued mutton.

The following week, at their next meeting, the investor Wang Qiang gave them a crucial piece of advice. Fallen Leaves would never work as a name, he said. It implied downward motion. He told them to call the business The Other Shore. It harked back to a classic Buddhist concept – crossing from the shore of ignorance to the shore of enlightenment. They immediately agreed. Things were looking up. They had friends in high places. They were no longer alone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Soon, The Other Shore outgrew its tiny showroom, and they opened a second shop in Beijing’s bustling north-west.’ Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix

By that point, they were making 30-40,000 yuan per month – enough to start building a team. They hired a second employee, and then a third. Xu began delegating his postmortem scrubdowns to subordinates. Soon, The Other Shore outgrew its tiny showroom, and in November, they opened a second shop in Beijing’s bustling north-west, a two-storey property with an elegant spiral staircase. They stocked the shelves with cremation boxes, which they spaced out and lit softly like designer handbags. They expanded their team to a dozen – a diffident group of accountants, web designers and social media specialists who spent their days tapping away on keyboards in a glass-walled office on the shop’s upper floor. Xu instructed them to treat customers like friends. One day I saw a smiling, silver-haired old man stand among the cremation boxes and complain that cemetery plots were too expensive, as three employees smiled along, and with sad eyes, agreed.

Yet the setbacks seemed endless. They hired young, enthusiastic employees and then fired them weeks later for incompetence; they tried and failed to organise educational workshops with a paediatric hospital ward; they abandoned their dream of selling products online, unable to mitigate the risk of gaffes such as delivering cremation boxes to unwitting recipients. Moreover, as the business grew, Xu and Wang found themselves attracting unwanted attention. One night, after the rest of the team had gone home, Xu and Wang sat across from each other in the office when they heard a loud crash. They looked down to see a brick, then back up to see the jagged remains of a shattered window. Xu immediately ran downstairs. He thought he glimpsed a man running, but before he could give chase, the figure ducked into the shadows. They installed a security camera by the door. They replaced the shattered windows and reinforced them with wire grates. “What else could we do?” Xu said. Sometimes, they caught furtive, resentful glances from the owners of nearby funeral services shops, but no one came forward with information about the attack.

Xu and Wang tried to distract themselves with hard work. Unable to fulfil their e-commerce ambitions, they sought out unconventional services that seemed to be gaining popularity abroad. They signed contracts with an Australian company to turn cremated ashes into synthetic “memorial diamonds”, and an American company called Celestis to shoot them into space. (A diamond costs about $1,500, Xu told me; a “memorial space flight” costs about $700. “It’s very cheap,” he said.) Xu purchased a new selection of cremation boxes – a solid gold box, a pink heart, a miniature frosted-glass mansion. On one wall he hung, inexplicably, an oil painting of the Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee – the man behind Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four – as a sample “memorial product” to commemorate the dead. (Stan Lee was still alive, I told him, and he shrugged.)

And then on 22 March 2014, 753 days after Wang’s mother first entered the hospital, she passed away. Wang conducted the postmortem scrubdown himself, weeping. She had never found out about his business. The funeral, at Babaoshan, was a blur. After the ceremony, street-side flower vendors convinced him to spend £100 on bouquets to lay at his mother’s feet, and despite knowing full well that he was being scammed, he didn’t have the energy to resist them. Again, Wang felt his sense of mission slip. He had spent the past year and a half trying in vain to master an industry bound by an enormous knot of bureaucracy and corruption; how could he be trusted to help others, when he couldn’t even untangle it himself? Again, he stopped going to work. Alone, he wondered whether his venture was worth the strain.

* * *

Earlier this year, I asked Xu whether I could watch The Other Shore do business, and two weeks later, he called to tell me that he had huo, a Chinese term meaning goods. A sixtysomethingman named Zhu had died of cancer, and his daughter, who was in her 30s, found The Other Shore on Baidu. Xu took the call. That evening, he sent his store manager Wang Jianfeng to the hospital to scrub Zhu down, as his family stood in the next room, sobbing. Over the next couple of days, Wang Jianfeng, an energetic 31-year-old, met Zhu’s daughter to run through financials. They spoke in the store’s softly lit display room, under Stan Lee’s watchful gaze. They compiled a list of expenditures: from The Other Shore, she would buy a red sandalwood cremation box and 12 floral wreaths; from Babaoshan, she would buy accommodation for the corpse in a collective mortuary, a funerary makeup service and the use of a small reception hall for the memorial meeting. Altogether, she would spend about 15,000 yuan, or £1,500.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Other Shore shop in Beijing displays its products rather like a designer handbag shop Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix for the Guardian

Zhu’s daughter booked the funeral for Friday morning, two days after her father’s death, and Xu asked Wang Jianfeng to attend the ceremony. (Xu and Wang like to have an Other Shore employee on hand during funerals as a hedge against incompetence. “There are no standards in this industry,” explained Wang. “There’s no protocol, no code of conduct. Everything is very off the cuff.” At one funeral, Xu recalled, he watched a reception hall employee water ceremonial flowers until a puddle seeped from the bottom of the pot and spread towards a nearby power strip. Xu, panicked, leapt to his feet and moved the strip away.)

Wang Jianfeng arrived at Babaoshan early. Past the graveyard’s high vermilion doors, the city’s roar fell to a whisper. Cobblestone paths snaked past granite monoliths bearing the names of Communist party luminaries – professors, soldiers, poets – and converged on a large reception hall overlooking a flagstone square. The day was cold and bright, but the atmosphere felt muddled – Zhu’s black-clad friends and family looked confused, pacing aimlessly over the smooth grey flagstones. It was hard to blame them. It was as if the Beijing of their day-to-day lives, that bastion of capitalist hustle, had vanished into a vacuum of Mao-era grandiosity, leaving them adrift.

Just before 10am, the family took a lift to the second floor of Babaoshan’s reception hall, an echoing atrium with the institutional sheen of a bank or hospital. Zhu’s family entered a small room, while about a dozen friends and relatives packed into a vestibule facing a high, red door. “Bow,” they heard someone say inside. After five or six minutes, the music stopped, the door opened, and a male employee in a down vest emerged into the vestibule. “Is the leader here?” he said. “The leader of the work unit, is he here?” The relatives glanced at one another awkwardly, but no one came forward. “If the work unit leader is present,” the man said, “the work unit leader needs to stand at the front of the line. Friends line up next. All other relatives are last.”

Wang Jianfeng didn’t say a word. Occasionally, he helped the employees move floral wreaths, but mostly he just followed along in lockstep with the hall’s well-oiled ceremony. He watched the relatives enter the room and quietly file past the old man, who lay in a glass coffin with a white sheet pulled up to his chest. He watched them mutter send-offs – “rest in peace” – then remove the small, white flowers pinned to their shirts and drop them in a wooden box by the door.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Xu Yi at Babaoshan cemetery. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix

“Well, that’s about it,” said the Babaoshan employee, as impassive as a carnival ride operator helping passengers disembark. “Does anyone have anything they’d like to take home as a memento?” The employee glanced around the room. “We could give you some of his fingernail clippings. You could have those.” A few moments passed before the stunned silence was broken.

“Did anyone bring a nail-clipper?” asked one of the mourners.

“No,” said another. “Did you?”

“No, me neither.” Silence.

“Did anyone bring a nail-clipper? An ordinary pair of scissors would do.” (All were silent, Wang Jianfeng included).

“No one, seems like – nobody told us anything about this.”

The employee looked over the assembled crowd. “Time’s about up,” he said. “That’s all for now,” and they slowly shuffled out of the room.

Afterwards, Xu led a routine staff meeting to discuss the operation. He noted the nail-clipper incident – “that shouldn’t have happened”, he said – and added nail-clippers to the list of items that employees should bring along in the field. But apart from that, the proceedings were “very, very ordinary”, he said. When I asked him about the funeral again a few weeks later, he could barely remember the details.

The first time I met Xu, in early 2014, he had sounded more like a whistleblower than an entrepreneur. “We want to change the way people think about death,” he had told me. But by early 2015, he seemed to speak only about new inventory and employee retention, diamonds and outer space. The Other Shore’s fortunes continued to rise – in 2014, they made 3m yuan (£311,000) in gross profit, Wang said; they grew their team to 20 employees. But none of their “innovations” approached the audacity of their initial vision. “Looking at our plans two and a half years ago, we were pretty naive,” Wang later told me. I realised that they no longer strove to disrupt China’s funeral industry – that the industry would not yield – and that amid its pastiche of tradition and grey-market commerce, they had found a home.

* * *

One day this spring, Wang stood on a massive stage at a TV studio in western Beijing, dripping sweat. Although he was on TV he wore a casual grey zip-up sweater over his T-shirt – that’s just what startup founders wore, he reasoned – and he could feel it soaking through. The studio lights beat down on him like suns. Intermittently, pyrotechnic sparks would shoot up from the stage’s periphery. Wang was nervous – the show, We Are the Hero, a showcase for up-and-coming entrepreneurs, would be nationally televised. The premise was simple: he was to stand in front of a giant LED screen, Steve Jobs-style, and pitch his startup to 30 angel investors seated in front of him on staggered platforms, like court officials. They would then ask him a few questions. If they were impressed, they could vote to give him a small round of funding. Xu waited anxiously in the wings.

Before he knew it, Wang was on air. He spoke quickly and made sweeping hand gestures, his palms upturned. “My work involves helping people dry their tears,” he told the panel. He explained the size of the market. He explained space burials. He stopped in the middle of sentences, to catch his breath. His pitch ended, and the audience clapped politely. But the investors seemed sceptical. They worried about marketing. One found that The Other Shore’s prices didn’t greatly differ from those of their competitors. After a short back-and-forth, Xu joined Wang onstage for the final judgment. A loud buzz echoed through the studio. “The 30 investors have all voted negative,” announced the host. Sparks shot out from the sides of the stage.

Wang and Xu had plastered their WeChat accounts with excited updates before the taping, but had been strangely quiet since it aired. In May, I flew to Macau, a former Portuguese colony jutting off of China’s southern coast, to see how they were getting on. Wang and Xu had been invited to deliver a speech on “online-to-offline” business strategies at a major industry conference. This time, they were in their element. The Asia Funeral Expo & Conference occupied two floors at the Macau Tower, a space-agey concrete edifice with sweeping views over the city’s dark waterways and shimmering casinos. More than 100 industry insiders attended. They included Mongolian morticians, American hearse-makers and Chinese coffin exporters who had never attended a funeral abroad, but knew that Americans like to be buried in mahogany while Russians prefer paulownia.

Xu, in between meetings, took some time to chat. I noticed that he’d gained a certain swagger – his hair was neater, his shirt freshly pressed. After the show aired, something extraordinary had happened, he told me. The Other Shore’s trickle of customers turned into a steady stream; often he’d see three or four a day. Some left him slightly baffled. They would pretend to grieve, then hound him for bits of operational insight – where he found his inventory, how he hired a team. Slowly, it dawned on Xu that they were would-be competitors, scoping out the industry just as he had once done himself. “They’re coming to study from us,” he said, his eyes alight. While Xu once dismissed the industry beyond Beijing as “too backwards” to warrant much interest, he began eyeing shop sites in provincial cities such as Zhengzhou and Chengdu.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wang Dan with a picture of his mother, Bai Yiyun, holding him as a child. Photograph: James Wasserman/Demotix

Wang also appeared to be doing well. The pain he’d experienced after his mother’s death had subsided into quiet grief, and eventually, acceptance. One day recently, he posted a faded childhood photograph to WeChat. His mother, Bai Yiyun, stands on a rocky beach, holding him close, the wind tussling her frizzy hair. Below the image, he wrote a poem:

Last night

In a dream

Mama’s 63rd birthday

A sweet and fragrant cake

Soft candle light

And also that smiling face

Gentle and kind



That afternoon in Macau, Wang took the podium at 2pm before about a dozen badge-wearing participants. He wore a grey suit, and spoke with a confidence that had eluded him on television, leaning so far over the podium that his shoulder pads protruded from his jacket. He emphasised the importance of “individualising your service” and “setting up an appropriate environmental ambiance”. The audience scribbled furiously on notepads.

As soon as Wang stepped off stage, he was swarmed by admirers – a Hong Kong university student, a fashionable Singaporean mortician, a Shanghainese woman who built a cemetery in Phnom Penh. He added some of them on WeChat. Standing beside the scrum, I began to see his achievements in a different light. In China, it’s an old truism that systemic change comes slowly, like the grinding of tectonic plates. Although Wang had failed to revolutionise China’s funeral industry, he had a team, a vision, and an audience – and moreover, the presence of mind to treat his hometown’s endemic injustices and restrictions as a cost of doing business. He had built a profitable company. And for that, he was very proud.

Soon the crowd thinned, and Wang changed back into his T-shirt and jeans, pocketed his business cards, and walked off into the expo hall’s melange of melancholy, empathy and hustle.

Additional reporting by Zeo Niu

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