Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery - Crematorium

Crematorium

From the start, the crematorium used at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery was Type 82B, the Chinese copy of a 1940's era Czech crematorium, which could only be operated manually, resulting in very slow preparation time. Furthermore, it took huge effort to clean the crematorium. Whenever a high-ranking official's funeral took place, ordinary citizens must wait and their original schedules were disrupted, and this caused many complaints from the public.

To solve the problem, in 1984, China imported two new crematoria from a Japanese firm in Tokyo (日本东京博善株式会社), one went to Shenyang, and the other went to Babaoshan. The Japanese crematorium was highly automatic but also could be operated manually when wanted, and in addition, the pollution generated during the cremation was next to nothing. However, such environmental friendly process comes at a price: the cremation process itself takes much longer and consumed more fuel. Nonetheless, due to other advantages such as the easy of cleaning and automation, all activities other than the cremation were greatly reduced, resulting in much higher efficiency. The higher efficiency in turn, helped to solve the schedule conflicts and reduced complaints. After two months of installation and testing, the Japanese crematorium formally went into service and replaced the obsolete Type 82B crematorium, and it remained in service until this day, specifically used to cremate high-ranking governmental officials' cadavers.

Although the Japanese crematorium is adequate, the ever increasing need required new crematorium, and a new domestic crematorium that was fully computerized was added to the inventory. The new crematorium further improved environmental standards and efficiency, and consume less fuel in comparison to the Japanese crematorium while the cremation process was shorter. This newest addition was produced by Shougang, and are mainly used for common citizens.