The Clancy Brothers recorded and preserved for posterity an old British vaudevuille song, entitled The’re Movin’ Father’s Grave to Build a Sewer, a lament of a Britsh workingman confronting the prospect of a taking of his father’s grave site in order to put in “nine-inch drains” to bring modern sewers to a “posh bloke’s residence.” (You can find a link to it in the right-hand margin of our fellow blogmeister’s handiwork at www.inversecondemnation.com — check it out).
But now, following the admonition of Oscar Wilde that “nature imitates art,” we have a real situation like that from — where else? — China. It seems that in spite of the Chinese government’s adherence to communist verities, the newly-enacted property rights over there are being taken seriously — very seriously. The Huffington Post brings us a dispatch that the owner of a cemetery in which his kinfolks are buried has flat-out refused to move his “father’s grave” and has refused compensation which he considers inadequate. So the developer is building his structure around the portion of the cemetery in which those graves are located. Like this:
See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/china-graves-construction-site_n_2250596.html