This Japanese-style house with a hot spring costs US$2,100 and is one of the many paper designs on offer at Skea Design. The company specializes in custom-made products that will be burned at funerals. (Staff photo/Chen Mei-ling)<P>

This Japanese-style house with a hot spring costs US$2,100 and is one of the many paper designs on offer at Skea Design. The company specializes in custom-made products that will be burned at funerals. (Staff photo/Chen Mei-ling)<P>

Palm trees and comfortable beach chairs, a fully furnished two-floor Japanese-style house with spa, a health club equipped with the latest equipment, a high-end box of assorted cosmetics, plates full of sushi and other tasty foods are just some aspects of the modern lifestyle that can be found on the display shelves at Skea Design. However, there are no life-sized products for sale in this Taipei-based shop. Each paper design has been made miniature and is destined to be consumed on the funeral pyre.

With its hip name and a variety of products on offer, at first glance, Skea Design could easily pass for just another boutique satisfying the fleeting demands of Taipei's youth, but the young design team takes pride in setting foot in the hallowed ground of a Chinese tradition dating back thousands of years. "We believe what we are making with our own hands will be used by our relatives and friends in another world," the company's director, Yean Han, said Nov. 9.

At Chinese funerals, miniature houses and all manner of other items pertaining to daily life are burned as offerings to the recently departed, as Chinese people believe that in this way the deceased will get to use the objects in the afterlife. "The theory behind the practice is that we should treat the dead in the same way as we treat the living," George Chen, director of De-Yuan Funeral Service Co., said Nov. 12.

He explained that the core principle of organizing a funeral according to traditional beliefs was to "avoid impending trouble and seek good luck." Therefore, he said, a funeral director needs to help find an auspicious day for ceremonies to take place. And to avoid otherworldly trouble, it is vital that salt and rice grains be thrown on the coffin whenever it is moved. "Every action is linked to something," Chen said, "It is a highly complicated operation."

It is no surprise that current funeral practices have become so complex because they are the culmination of thousands of years of Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist rituals, he pointed out, adding that burning paper effigies is one practice that has remained the same, even if other customs have changed over the centuries. According to Chen, the practice of burning paper figures can be traced all the way back to the Tang dynasty of ancient China between 618 and 907 A.D.

Despite their importance to any funeral rite, over the years, however, the design and personality of paper objects seem to have been sacrificed for size and mediocrity. "Many paper houses designed for burning today are made in standardized forms and come from factories in China or other Southeast Asia countries," Han said. "They are just for showing off at funerals, so are usually oversized objects with completely wrong proportions," the 28-year-old added.

If size is the only thing that matters, Han said, "The ritual of burning will be a dead one." It is the attention to detail that is more important than enormity, she said, elaborating, "We put our mind and attentiveness into the making of the objects because we believe that the dead will use them. Those who come to us share the same belief and attitude." Han also pointed out that as burning large effigies is not environmentally friendly, Skea Design insists on using materials that create as little pollution as possible.

It all started, Han recalled, when her grandfather passed away in 2006. Her family was not at all satisfied with the paper houses on offer, so Han and her friends decided to make one instead. It took them two days and two nights to find the right paper, draw up designs and, finally, construct the kind of Japanese-style house that her grandfather had always dreamed of living in. The finished product delighted Han's grandmother, lighting up her sad face, she said.

"We discovered this to be a meaningful thing to do. The death of a loved one is a sad event, yet what we are doing brings comfort to the dead, as well as the living," Han said, recounting her initiation of stepping into a business that she had no experience in.

After only one month of opening, the design house had a sales volume equivalent to what a regular salesman might accumulate in a whole year, with orders coming from as far away as California. One of Skea's latest products--an iPhone look-alike with a Chinese-language interface--was so lifelike that it caused many bloggers to suspect it was a copy of the real thing. "Web surfers finally realized what our products are intended for and that we are not manufacturing cheap copies of brand names," Han said.

She described how the team invited customers to take part in the process of manufacturing by remembering things about the departed, the kind of houses or food they liked, for example. In this way, Han believed, people can have a proper avenue for their grief. "We are serious in creating our own brand and serving people who continue to care for those they have survived," she added.

Some people may suggest that adding brightness and humor to the grim circumstances of a funeral is unorthodox, yet Skea Design believes it is doing noble work by catering to sincere individuals who believe there is a special and personal way to build a connection with a loved one who has passed away.

With this sense of belief driving the business forward, the design team set out to take its ideas to a greater audience via the Internet. A good example of the responsibility the company takes in offering its service is in the section concerning aborted fetuses. Skea Design's website advocates a responsible way of life, but should a baby be aborted, the team advises that it be honored in the same way as any departed loved one. Excessive feelings of fear and guilt only allow unscrupulous monks to take advantage of such grief, the website warns. "Fortunately, we haven't received many orders for our baby sets," Han said.

Unethical "holy" men and unprofessional funeral operators are just two of the problems that the government is trying to combat, said Chen, who has a master's degree from the Department of Life-and-Death Studies at Nanhua University in Chiayi County.

According to local media, Taiwan's Council of Labor Affairs will introduce a certification system for funeral directors by November next year. The system is expected to establish a stricter sense of professionalism in the industry and weed out those unfit to serve the public, Chen said.

"Although most people providing funeral services come from the lower levels of society, they still do business in an upright way," he said, lamenting that the low income associated with funeral businesses has indeed prompted some to exploit grieving individuals, however.

Chen said that Taiwan currently lags behind other developed countries, such as the United States, in recognizing and promoting the professionalism of funeral services. "The United States introduced a system to certify funeral undertakers in the 1940s, when people started to be referred to as funeral directors." A similar certification system in Taiwan could increase the standard of services offered, he hoped, and, in the long run, help the public have a more favorable impression of those who permanently have one foot in this world and the other in the next.