China’s funeral parlours use 3D printing to restore faces of the dead destroyed by tragedy, revolutionise mortuary practice
- Decades of traditional mortuary practice are being replaced in some of China’s funeral parlours as 3D printing helps repair faces lost in death
- In one case a mortician said a woman who had died after falling off a building was so disfigured it took 10 hours to repair her face
In Zhang Lianchao’s first year working as a mortician he saw a lot of dead bodies, but none quite like the body of a woman who had tragically plunged to her death from a tall building – she barely had a face any more.
“Her head had an open wound, shaped like a petunia ... when the family came, they carried all the tissues, including the brain, in a plastic bag,” he said.
Zhang said he and his coworkers at the Xi’an Funeral Home can often spend more than 10 hours working on a body like this; they replace missing tissue from the head, then fill it with cotton to create a more life-like shape, before carefully stitching the skin together using special thread.
“It’s delicate work, because facial skin is quite tender, and if you pull the thread hard, the skin will rip,” Zhang said.
Open casket funerals are common in China, where it is traditional for family and friends to see the deceased one last time. This means bodies must be restored as close as possible to how they were in life.
Many of my colleagues had nightmares when they first started with this profession
