The night before Christmas, a spirit came to visit Mr Scrooge. He was the Ghost of the Christmas Past. It was never known whether this spirit was an angle or the devil, but he had miraculous power of time travel. He took Mr Scrooge back in time where the cemetery business was just a hole in the ground with or without a head stone. Dead people were buried and remembered for a while and were forgotten after a few generations. Cemetery places were reused over and over again, very ofter opened up for farming for food.

The spirit changed face and became the Ghost of the Christmas Present. Mr Scrooge got to appreciate his successful business. Beautiful and expensive tombs were his most welcome product. However, this business was in a decline because cemetery land was getting scarce. Looking back, Mr Scrooge could not help stop admiring his own talent. Just like the expensive shop space, merchants were opening up smaller shops. Some professions had partners sharing one shop. The most clever merchants even demarcated their shops into several hundred boxes of show windows each selling different product. The ingenious Mr Scrooge did the same. He started the columbarium business where ashes of human remains were stored in small compartments. The business did not start lucrative as a small space could not sell much. But volume could compensate the small price. A small columbarium with a large number of spaces added up to good numbers. Then there was the columbarium implosion. No more land space was available for open burial, and also no more land space was available for columbarium. Mr Scrooge was on the good end of the implosion. His columbarium had suddenly become a monopoly. With elaborate decoration to suit all sorts of religions, an one square foot space could now sell for over one hundred thousand dollars.

The spirit changed again into the Ghost of the Christmas Future. Mr Scrooge asked who were your actually. The spirit said had you not heard of the trinity. I was the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future, three was one. It was the future of the cemetery business that Mr Scrooge should take notice. First a projection to the future. There was a cemetery or columbarium crisis already. Dead people were not buried. Some rich dead people were fighting for a small number of spaces. For the people alive, or not dead yet, there were seven million in the city. They would all be dead in a few decades. If the current practice of keeping dead people around was not changed, at least in the next two generations, there would be twenty one million dead people before the end of the century. We would need a lot more columbaria all over the city. The government was trying to find space in all eighteen districts. It was a very small effort which could not solve the problem in the long term. It was just a political move trying to defuse the pressure from the districts.
The sky turned dark and Mr Scrooge was shown the worst scenario. Districts could not come to an agreement and all refused to accept a columbarium in the neighbourhood. People were stacking the remains of their ancestors at any shop available. The situation was out of control. The government had to declare martial law and confiscate a building at every street corner to be converted into a columbarium. This was met with severe opposition. People took to the street and riots were everywhere. Mr Scrooge asked one angry demonstrator, did you have the remains of your ancestor unburied? He answered, yes, but never in my neighbourhood.

Just when Mr Scrooge was thinking who else could be better than him to be the Chairman managing this invaluable park, the face of the spirit turned blue and revealed the devilish side. Not so fast, he said. No one in Hong Kong would allow that to happen and no messiah could help in any way. The columbarium crisis would go on. Not just the number of dead people was piling up, the population of Hong Kong would also keep on growing in the next few decades; until one day a catastrophe triggered by a small event caused the population to collapse. Then, everyone would care for his own live and no one would take notice of the dead people anymore. This day would occur well before the last judgment.
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