Every year, South Korea turns over 3.6 million square meters of land to the dead. Each burial mound takes up about 50 square meters -- 3.5 times as much space as the person required while alive.

Traditionally, where one's ancestors are buried has been important to Koreans, mainly because of Confucian teachings requiring reverence for the dead. During the Choson Dynasty, in fact, poor families would often scale back their dining on their children's birthdays in order to make better food offerings to their ancestors on other major holidays.

Everyone professes to want a good plot when the time comes to bury his or her loved ones. Some are able to, and choose to, build tombs on the family compound. But others bury them elsewhere, perhaps in the mountains, because they haven't the land -- or perhaps because they'd rather the dead were buried elsewhere. It may be the Confucian preoccupation with death and ancestors that has left many Koreans with a vague (and sometimes not so vague) fear of ghosts.

What's more, as land grows scarcer and more dear, and as Koreans grow busier and more apt to live long distances from their ancestral homes, attitudes are changing. More Koreans are choosing cremation -- in Seoul, in the year 2000, almost half the dead were so consigned, rather than being encased in burial mounds. This compares with 30 percent just 4 years earlier. Predictions are that two-thirds of Seoul residents who die in 2006 will be cremated.

But in many of the more rural areas, burial remains the most desired end, and families build their mounds wherever they can. This mound is located behind the Green soju distillery in Kangnung. Perhaps it holds the remains of one of the distillery's founders.

Source: Korea Herald