Not all of us want our funeral to be melancholy.

In fact, more and more of us are keen to turn our final farewell into something joyous, a celebration of our time on earth… and what better way to do this than with strippers?

It may seem a little out there to our Western sensibilities, but inviting women to take their clothes off at funerals is a popular trend in Taiwan.


Reports suggest this unusual practice has its origins in the 1980s, when gangsters assumed control of the mortuary industry and offered strippers from their clubs to mourners at a respectfully discounted price.



Today, this is still popular in Taiwan and rural areas in the east of China where limited access to entertainment make funerals one of the few occasions locals can enjoy a little titillation.

Funerals on film

Taiwan’s funeral strippers could have remained obscure were it not for a man named Marc L Moskowitz.

This US academic, who heads up the anthropology department at the University of South Carolina, spent a total of 11 years living and working in Chinese-speaking Asia.

He was drawn to make a film about funeral strippers, entitled Dancing For The Dead: Funeral Strippers In Taiwan.

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In an online post, he stated: ‘The stripping performances started out as something that gangsters did, but generally spread out to become common practice throughout Taiwan. They are primarily associated with the working class or poorer communities.’

Moskowitz’s film captures young women dressed in skimpy bikinis, bum-skimming skirts and sky-high heels gyrating alongside caskets and atop Electric Flower Cars, which are now an industry in their own right.

These vehicles are ‘mobile stages that carry performers who sing, dance, bump, and grind as they accompany the dead during the last rites and in procession to the graveyard’.

As for the performances – the girls don’t hold back on the raunch.

Although Moskowitz’s film does not show nudity explicitly, he claimed ‘almost everyone’ he had spoken to reported seeing ‘full stripping’.

Videos of this practice are also a popular watch on YouTube.

In one particular film, the flower cars have been abandoned altogether as two girls dance seductively alongside the casket to a soundtrack of Moves Like Jagger.

Dancing for the crowds

Links to organised crime aside, the practice of funeral strippers, in fact, has its roots in Chinese custom and culture.

It is traditional for interments to be large-scale affairs, as having lots of people in attendance is thought to be a good portent for the newly deceased.

It also reflects their status and popularity and is a sign of honour.

And if there is one thing guaranteed to draw people to your funeral, it’s strippers.

Celebration is an important part of this, especially for anyone old.

Their life is feted rather than mourned and a big, joyous funeral is intended to give the deceased a last hurrah before they shuffle off this mortal coil.

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Families in rural areas customarily receive gifts and cash from the community to cover the costs, which often puts the grieving relatives under pressure to ensure all the guests are having a good time.



Once the official part of the funeral is over, strippers add cheer and lightness to proceedings.

They are also cited as being necessary to ‘appease wandering spirits’ – and herein lies the contradiction, given that the affront caused to moral and religious sensibilities formed the basis of a police crackdown on the custom in 2015.

A stop to the strippers?

Dancing at funerals is a ritual that has been evidenced around the world in cultures in South Africa, Ghana and Madagascar.

But in conservative China, strippers are another proposition.

In 2015, photos surfaced from a funeral in Hebei province that showed a dancer removing her clothes in front of an audience containing children.

Further funerals in Jiangsu and Handan led officials to release a statement announcing they would work alongside police to crack down on ‘pornographic performances’ for good.

As reported by The Guardian, the press release stated that the clampdown would ‘focus on the commercial performance market and further strengthen rural cultural market regulation and law enforcement, and joint authorities will crack down on stripping and other acts of illegal business performance market’.

The first casualty of this new, strict approach was the Red Rose Dance Ensemble.

The troupe was fined for a two-and-a-half-hour performance that took place at the funeral of an elderly Handan city resident.

Three others were detained at a similar show two weeks later.

If the funeral of a man called Tung Hsiang is anything to go by, the government’s stricter stance is having little impact.

As a former council speaker in Chiayi City, Taiwan, the deceased was a popular elected official – he died from an unspecified illness in December 2016, aged 76, and his funeral cortege brought traffic to a standstill.


It featured 50 strippers and pole dancers, a convoy of expensive imported Jeeps in rainbow colours, thumping dance music, a drumming troupe, flag bearers, a marching band and performers in costume as local deities.

Apparently, Mr Tung had envisaged the whole thing in a dream, telling his brother, Tung Mao-hsiung, that he wanted his funeral to be ‘hilarious’.

Clearly, his sibling did not disappoint.

Taiwan’s funeral strippers may appear extreme – they do nothing to forward the feminist cause and their relationship with spirituality is tenuous at best.

Yet there is something fun about their presence – they turn what would otherwise be a sombre occasion into a jubilant, life-affirming event.

It is certainly an unusual custom, but we all die, and it would be a shame if Taiwan’s funeral stripping industry did the same.

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