Locals in some villages in the Central Highlands, where have been covered by forests for centuries, are increasingly unable to preserve their burial ceremony traditions as they are left with no wood to decorate cemeteries.

Nowadays, it is easy to see cement-made coffins placed in the front yards of houses on stilts, hinting that the family has elderly people.

But this is a bizarre sight for locals, whose traditional method of burying people includes coffins made from a whole tree trunk with a hole carved in the middle.

Wooden statues belong to the past

Just ten kilometers from Chu Prong District in the Central Highland province of Gia Lai is Ia Kly Commune. Roads in the area are all asphalted.

Ia Kly is the homeland of five farming villages, including Lan, Po, Klah, Nu, and Thung, and home to 3,000 people of the Jrai ethnic minority people.

Regardless of the passage of time, village locals have maintained their long-time farming jobs cultivating paddy and corn and some other trees. Their daily activities have changed slowly, as is true in many other traditional farming localities.

But one thing that has dramatically changed is the Jrai people's history and folklore. The disappearance of wooden coffins, which are created from whole tree trunks, and wooden statues used to decorate tombs in the cemeteries of the Jrai people has signified the growing elimination of traditional elements from their culture.

Traditionally, each Jrai community has its own cemetery located in the west of the village. It is a holy location to hold the bỏ mả (burial) rite. There, locals not only come to bury dead members of the community, but also to perform dances and songs and beat gongs to see them off into a new world.

Jrai people consider the ceremony akin to Tet (New Year) festival.

Amidst an area of immense forests, wooden coffins and statues have long been ‘must-haves’ in the ceremony and acted as sacred witnesses in the cemetery. These are the traditions of not only Jrai, but also other ethnic minority people in the Central Highlands.

Now, the coffins and statues still exist but as replicas of the original, since they are made from cement.

Traditional statues in a cemetery of Jrai people in the Central Highlands (Photo: Tuoi Tre)

Rolan Yik of the Lan Village pointed at a cement coffin in front of a house, saying, “Our forests have run out of trees and wood, so we have to do it like this. This has been popular for many years.”

“Each [cement] coffin costs no less than a million dong [US$48],” he added.

The price seems inexpensive but this is a really big sum, equal to one or two times the monthly income of a local, in comparison to chopping down a big tree in the forest to create a coffin as before, which cost almost nothing.

Numerous tombs in Jrai cemeteries are now made from cement and covered on the top with iron sheet instead of wooden artifacts.

The destruction of forests has occurred not only in Ia Kly.

In only the first three months this year, an additional 460 hectares of forests were leveled.

According to a survey by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the whole Central Highlands region has lost 206,000 hectares of forests in the last eight years due to the leveling of forests for farming cultivation, construction of hydropower projects and industrial parks, and illegal deforestation.

Protected forests and national parks and sanctuaries in the region such as Yok Don, Chu Yang Sin, and Dak Uy have been continuously shrinking.