By Emma Young

Do you know how far you’d have to walk to get from the central railway station in Wuhan, China to the nearest cemeteries? I’ll tell you: an average of just over 25 kilometres. For Berlin, the figure is less than 5. “Chinese tourists are surprised by unexpectedly running into cemeteries when visiting cities in Europe,” write the authors of a new paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. “They are curious when seeing how close to a graveyard people live and spend their leisure time there because these are rarely encountered in China.”

In fact, when the team plotted the mean walking distance between the central railway station and the five nearest cemeteries in 10 European capital cities and 10 major cities in China, the difference was clear: the longest European distance was still less far than the shortest distance in China.

Why might this be? Xiaoyue Fan at Peking University and colleagues wondered if differences in religiosity might explain it. The majority of the Chinese population has no religious affiliation, the team notes, whereas this is not the case in Europe. Perhaps, then, people who believe in an afterlife are less troubled by seeing symbols of mortality — like graveyards — and this is why they are closer to the centres of so many European cities.