A tombstone costing 120k and AI immortality for 399—how would you choose?

“The First Stock in Funeral Services” Fushouyuan Suspended Trading.

By the end of March 2026, this industry giant once called the “Maotai of the Funeral Industry” faced its most severe trust crisis in a year, due to delayed annual reports and executive misconduct, just as the most profitable Qingming season arrived. Behind this internal control failure is the reality that Chinese people are abandoning high-priced cemeteries, and traditional death businesses are nearing their end.

When farewells in the real world become so expensive and heavy, a natural digital migration about “death” has occurred. Traditional funeral giants are beginning to embrace AI, building digital memorial halls, launching AI remembrance, and trying to reconstruct the appearance and expressions of the deceased with multimodal large models.

When a marble slab costing 120k yuan is no longer easily purchased, they decide to sell you a string of code that will never weather away.

Death, in this AI era, is completing a shift from physical preservation to digital immortality. Behind this shift are not only Silicon Valley geeks eager to fight death but also the most traditional merchants, whose graveyards are about to become unsellable.

The Dusk of the Maotai of the Funeral Industry

Let’s first look at how lucrative Fushouyuan once was.

Over the past twelve years, Fushouyuan’s average gross profit margin exceeded 80%, reaching as high as 92.8% in 2023. This is a figure that most entrepreneurs envy; even during the golden age of rapid real estate growth, profit margins hovered around 30%. Such profitability is almost unmatched in China’s A-shares and Hong Kong stocks markets.

This super-high profit margin is underpinned by two factors: scarce land resources and the traditional “thick burial” customs. Chinese culture has long believed that “affairs of the dead are like those of the living,” as recorded by Yuan Mei in “Suiyuan Poetry Talk,” where wealthy families’ tombs were often more elaborate than their homes. When this millennia-old cultural gene collided with the urbanization wave of the times, business capital keenly captured it, evolving into a decades-long “underground real estate” boom.

From 2012 to 2017, the price of customized artistic tombs at Fushouyuan rose from 259.8k yuan to 421.8k yuan, while finished artistic tombs increased from 89.6k yuan to 100.8k yuan. After 2017, Fushouyuan stopped publicly disclosing specific prices for each product line, but the upward trend continued. By 2024, the average price per tomb had quietly surpassed 120k yuan.

Calculating based on a 2-square-meter tomb, the average price exceeds 60k yuan per square meter, enough to surpass the housing prices in over 90% of Chinese cities, rivaling first-tier residential properties in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. In Songhe Garden in Shanghai, some tombs reach as high as 760k yuan per square meter—three times the price of the Top of Tianshan.

However, this wealth fortress built with marble and Feng Shui layers began to collapse in 2024.

In 2024, Fushouyuan’s net profit was 373 million yuan, a 52.8% plunge year-on-year, marking the largest decline since 2010. By the first half of 2025, the situation worsened: revenue fell to 611 million yuan, a shocking 44.5% drop, and net profit turned into a loss of 261 million yuan, marking its first half-year loss since listing.

Even more devastating was the price collapse. In the first half of 2025, the average selling price of operational tombs dropped from 120.7k yuan per tomb to 63.4k yuan—a 47.5% decline, nearly halving. Despite such drastic price cuts, sales could not be saved. Throughout 2024, Fushouyuan sold only 12,569 operational tombs, 3,816 fewer than the previous year—a decline of over 23%.

Not only Fushouyuan, but almost the entire funeral sector is collapsing. Fucheng Shares’ tomb sales revenue fell from a peak of 227 million yuan in 2017 to 98 million yuan in 2024; Anxian Garden China is mired in losses; China Wantong Garden lost 9.39 million yuan in the first half of 2025; and China Life Group, listed in Hong Kong, has been struggling in a loss spiral since 2023.

As China’s aging population deepens, funeral services are a necessity, so why are leading companies experiencing such an abnormal decline?

Because more and more ordinary people are turning away from those exorbitant cemeteries they once aspired to. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s death rate in 2025 was 8.04‰, the highest in nearly 20 years; Tianyancha shows that the number of registered funeral-related enterprises reached a recent high in 2025. Clearly, market demand has not shrunk; what has changed is people’s choices.

The 2025 Central No. 1 Document explicitly called for “deepening funeral reform and promoting the construction of public ecological burial facilities.” Cities like Shenzhen, Guangxi, and Fujian have introduced subsidy policies, with sea burials offering up to 3,000 yuan per set of ashes, and some pilot areas up to 5,000 yuan. The rise of green ecological burial methods has directly diverted demand from traditional cemeteries.

Ultimately, when macroeconomic headwinds quietly blow through the wallets of the middle class, people no longer blindly cling to traditional, ostentatious tombs costing tens of thousands.

Faced with the collapse of core business, Fushouyuan did not sit idly but instead launched a frantic digital transformation. They introduced four core functions: Digital Memorial Hall, AI Remembrance, Fushou Online, and Memorial Home Yuan.

Digital Memorial Hall uses a 270° immersive panoramic video system to compile the deceased’s life images and audio into a virtual cloud farewell ceremony, allowing family members to say goodbye without being physically present, just through a screen.

AI Remembrance employs multimodal large models to animate static photos of the deceased, accurately restoring facial expressions, gestures, and even simulating smiles and gazes in specific scenarios.

Memorial Home Yuan is a cloud memorial platform where family members can create a dedicated memorial space for the deceased, uploading photos, videos, and texts for friends and relatives to visit anytime.

Data shows that by the end of 2025, the “Memorial Home Yuan” platform had over 2 million visits, “Fushou Online” mini-program had over 117k registered users, and in 2024, 677 digital ceremonies were held—doubling from the previous year.

However, Fushouyuan’s digital transformation still carries the dignity and restraint of an industry giant. When you look further into the broader internet landscape, you find a cheaper, rougher, and more fantastical AI “resurrection” business already growing wildly in the shadows.

“Resurrect” Your Family Member for Only 399 Yuan

Today’s “AI resurrection” industry shows extreme polarization.

At the top are giants like SenseTime, Silicon-based Intelligence, and Xiaoice, which hold core technologies. For them, awakening a deceased in the digital world often costs hundreds of thousands of yuan in R&D, months of data feeding, and strict ethical reviews.

But at the bottom of this pyramid is a different scene.

On major e-commerce platforms, many products are sold under names like “AI resurrect loved ones,” “make photos talk,” or “AI digital person,” with varying quality. Tianyancha data shows that by April 2026, over 9,400 cloud memorial-related companies are active nationwide, with about 1,000 new registrations just since the start of 2026. Most of these vendors lack any real AI R&D capability.

They use free open-source tools from abroad. Family photos and audio, regarded as treasures, are crudely imported into software, producing a rough video in minutes. The person in the photo is overlaid with a mechanical template, with lips moving out of sync with the sound, eyes hollow. Yet, such low-quality videos can be sold for hundreds of yuan, greedily harvesting people’s unfulfilled longing.

Beneath this cheap comfort lurks a more hidden chain of exploitation. The real profiteers are not interested in truly “resurrecting” loved ones but in “agent recruitment for 199 yuan, recruiting disciples for 399 yuan.” They spread sensational videos of AI-animated deceased celebrities on social media, capturing huge traffic, then converting that traffic into profits from downline recruits eager to get rich overnight.

Families longing to reunite with loved ones must unreserved