China produced more than twice the ship tonnage of the United States in 2024–25, a new report says, indicating Beijing is closing the naval gap with Washington. 

The World Defense Shipbuilding report, compiled by Flottes de Combat and the French maritime industry association Gican and released ahead of the Euronaval defense show, states that China built about 636,208 tons of combat ships over two years through December 2025, while the United States built about 270,509 tons in the same period. 

China accounted for more than a third of the global naval tonnage built in 2024-25, the report states, presenting the magnitude of China’s shipbuilding capability.

“We are seeing a fairly substantial expansion of naval forces, and consequently of shipbuilding,” Philippe Missoffe, Gican’s general director, said in a press briefing on October 20. “We’re seeing an increase in power capabilities, particularly nuclear-powered attack submarines, for example,” he added.

In the two-year period, China’s combat-vessel building was valued at $43.5 billion, while US construction totaled $26.8 billion, according to the report. It also notes that  China’s shipyards produced 202,520 tons in 2022–2023, while the US produced 245,703 tons in the previous two-year period, indicating a clear year-on-year surge for China.

The US Navy still leads China in the overall fleet tonnage.

As of January 1, 2026, US warships weighing more than 200 tons totaled 3.11 million tons, compared with China’s 1.44 million tons, says the report. However, just two years ago, the figures were 3.22 million tons for the US and 1.3 million tons for China, showing how Beijing is closing the displacement gap.

China has already surpassed the US Navy in ship count. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has more than 370 battle-force ships, whereas the US Navy has over 290.

This gap is expected to further increase. US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) predicted in its 2025 report titled “Ship Wars – Confronting China’s Dual-Use Shipbuilding Empires” that China would have a 425-ship-strong fleet by 2030, compared to the US Navy’s 300 vessels.

That said, adding more tonnage is different from simply churning out ships faster, which a navy can do by producing many small or medium-sized ones. Meanwhile, tonnage measures the total displacement of those ships. One large destroyer or amphibious ship can displace as much as several smaller frigates, and higher tonnage means more overall mass in the fleet, more weapons, sensors, fuel, aviation facilities, troops, and endurance.

Currently, China appears to be doing both, expanding the fleet by accelerating production of smaller combatants while also adding displacement to bigger, more sophisticated vessels. The strategy is meant to make the PLAN combat-ready in the future. 

Notably, the latest Euronaval report findings are significant but hardly surprising, given that American senators and congressional researchers have repeatedly warned that the US may not be able to keep up with Beijing’s growing naval fleet because of China’s ever-expanding shipbuilding capacity, and the delays and bottlenecks in US naval production.

As of now, the US Navy has many qualitative advantages over the PLAN, including 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, a large and capable submarine force, greater overall tonnage, higher missile capacity per ship in many classes, and extensive combat experience. However, these could erode if China sustains high output of modern ships.

For now, China producing more naval tonnage than the US reflects a sustained advantage in Chinese industrial capacity. However, Beijing did not build twice the tonnage of the United States from a purely military-industrial base.

Its ability to expand naval tonnage production compared with the US stems from its enormous dual-use shipbuilding industry and economies of scale the US no longer has.

Civilian-Military Fusion Is Driving Construction

China’s maritime development has accelerated as the lines between military and commercial shipbuilding have blurred, as in other strategic areas.

The China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC)—the world’s largest shipbuilder—is the poster child for China’s seamless fusion of civil and military shipbuilding capabilities.

The CSSC operates several shipyards, factories, and research institutes under the oversight of China’s top political and military leadership. It has built warships for the Chinese Navy, including the Type 003 Fujian aircraft carrier, the Type 055 destroyers, and the Type 075 amphibious assault ships, among other popular combat ships.

At the same time, it is acing civilian shipbuilding. The CSSC built more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire US shipbuilding industry had since WWII, as the EurAsian Times reported earlier. Chinese shipbuilders produced 53.69 million deadweight tons (DWT) of commercial vessels in 2025, or about 56.1% of the world’s output. They also scored 107.82 million DWT in new orders, and closed the year with an orderbook of 274.42 million DWT, or 66.8% of the global outstanding work.

Order volume from foreign customers suggests the world is rapidly becoming dependent on Chinese shipyards to meet demand for commercial trading vessels, allowing the CSSC to redirect commercial revenue toward naval warship construction.

The expansion of China’s commercial shipbuilding industry directly supports higher naval tonnage production, primarily through shared physical infrastructure, including the same large dry docks, slipways, heavy-lift cranes, and fabrication halls used to build container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers, to build warships. In fact, several major CSSC shipyards routinely build commercial vessels and naval ships side by side, meaning that China does not need a completely separate, underutilized set of military-only yards.

Open-source analysis and satellite imagery have documented this physical integration of civil and military ships on multiple occassions. For instance, gray-hulled battleships and commercial hulls were previously seen being built concurrently at the huge Changxing Island complex in Shanghai. It is not much different at other shipyards in Dalian, Hudong-Zhonghua, and the Longxue Island complex near Guangzhou.

Not every Chinese yard is dual-use in the same way, and some high-end naval facilities have become more specialized as the PLA Navy moves toward larger, more complex platforms. In fact, a 2024 RAND working paper noted that certain yards producing the newest surface combatants and carriers had reduced their commercial output.

Nonetheless, wherever civil-military fusion is widespread, commercial work keeps tens or hundreds of thousands of skilled welders, fitters, engineers, and managers employed year-round. This basically gives it an experienced labor pool it can direct toward naval projects.

Moreover, sustained commercial volume accelerates learning and process improvements that transfer to warship building.

China’s astounding rise in commercial shipbuilding has given it access to dual-use technologies such as specialized engines and propellers, navigation and control systems, integrated electronics, and radar modules.

Another advantage of this civil-military fusion is that the high-volume commercial production creates robust domestic supply chains for steel, engines, electrical systems, coatings, and other components. China uses these suppliers to support naval ships.

Additionally, high supply volumes drive down unit costs through economies of scale.

The machinery keeps running smoothly, with revenue flowing in from expanding commercial orders. These profitable commercial contracts, many from foreign buyers, generate cash flow that Beijing uses to fund yard expansion, integrate new equipment, and upgrade technology.

However, China’s rise as a shipbuilder did not happen overnight. It resulted from a long-term strategy that combined government support, investment in industrial infrastructure, a large workforce, and an extensive domestic supply chain. China developed the capacity to manufacture ships at an enormous scale while ensuring that many of the materials, components, and industrial facilities needed for production were available domestically. This helped Chinese shipyards become highly competitive in cost, capacity, and output.

“China has risen because, in 2015, they declared that seas are the future of prosperity and trade. Therefore, China needed to build robust maritime infrastructure and a strong PLAN to protect its interests.

These are two factors that made them realize that shipbuilding infrastructure should serve a twin purpose, so the facility can be used to its full potential since this infrastructure is expensive to build,” Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, a retired Indian Navy officer, earlier told the EurAsian Times.

By contrast, the US lacks this industrial base and has struggled to expand shipbuilding capacity to counter Beijing.

It is now deliberately drawing on the advanced commercial and naval shipbuilding expertise of its closest Indo-Pacific partners, including South Korea and Japan, to bolster shipbuilding and prevent delivery delays and cost increases that have become common for US Navy programs.

However, the latest figure suggests Washington may have to do more, and faster. 

China’s sustained high output of modern ships, underwritten by dual-use commercial strength, continues to narrow the quantitative gap. The United States retains qualitative and experiential advantages for now, but those edges are not permanent.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

The post China Outbuilt the U.S. by Over 2X in Naval Tonnage in 2024–25. How Did Beijing Outpace America? appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

Ask many successful Indian CEOs, entrepreneurs, or scientists how they rose to prominence in America, and they will tell you that, grit and talent aside, the key factor was the country itself: an economy and a culture that rewarded merit and drew ambitious, talented people from around the world.

Indian Americans are among the most affluent and best-educated groups in the country. What distinguishes them from other immigrant groups is that they have risen to the top in one generation. Median household income for Indian Americans is $151,200, compared with $92,530 for white Americans. About three-quarters of Indian adults 25 and older in the U.S. hold a bachelor’s degree, against a national average of 38 percent. Nearly half have graduate degrees, and the poverty rate, 6 percent, is among the lowest of any ethnic group. Indian Americans tend to be employed and law-abiding.

For a community more accustomed to being called the “model minority” or “tech’s new titans,” a recent rise in anti-Indian rhetoric—now commonplace on sites and apps such as X, YouTube, and Reddit—has been a shock. According to Stop AAPI Hate, nearly half of South Asian adults living in America reported having been targeted in a “race-based hate act” in 2025 alone. From 2023 to 2025, the use of anti–South Asian slurs online surged by 109 percent. The Trump administration has also attacked immigrants coming from India with efforts to severely restrict the H-1B visa program, a legal pathway to American jobs; 70 percent of H-1B recipients are Indian. Despite two different judges blocking President Trump’s $100,000 fee for the visa, the administration claims that applications are down 92 percent at the largest IT-staffing and -outsourcing firms—a decline that it views as a massive success.

Indian immigrants have helped make this country great. America has long needed Indian immigrants, and it still does. But people who don’t understand the great contributions of Indian Americans would rather close the door, and are hostile to those who are already here.

By 1960, Europeans made up 75 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. By 2010, the balance had reversed, and Europeans were just 12 percent of all immigrants. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, in 1990 fewer than a million Indians were living in the U.S. A decade later, their numbers doubled because of a hiring spree for engineers to help avert a potential Y2K crisis. Today, some 5.2 million Indians reside in America, more than 60 percent of whom were born in India. Although they represent just 1.5 percent of the population, their sudden success has made them very visible—and that visibility has made them targets.

[Jonathan Chait: The mainstreaming of anti-Indian bigotry]

Indian-born executives are running several of the biggest technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe. They have been at the center of some people’s anger over AI and layoffs throughout the tech industry. In politics, the rise of Ro Khanna, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kamala Harris, and Zohran Mamdani has also caused online and real-life hate toward those with Indian heritage. For Americans uneasy about how the country is changing, seeing Indians in charge can feel more like a threat than a hopeful sign about the viability of the American dream.

Immigration politics have always been tangled up with discrimination. In the 1850s, the United States brought in cheap Chinese laborers to work its mines, farms, and railroads. When the economy shrank during the 1870s, the cry of “they’re taking our jobs”—familiar today—led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which restricted Chinese immigration for the next 60 years. Japanese and, later, Korean workers met the same antagonism, and the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, effectively shut out immigrants from most of Asia. The country went through a long period of xenophobia that targeted not only nonwhite immigrants but also “undesirable” white immigrants, such as Italians and Eastern European Jews. In 1910, the foreign-born population was 14.7 percent; by 1960, it had fallen to 5.4 percent.

In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act eased the old restrictions, in large part because the country was short of skilled labor, particularly in the STEM fields. Two developments drove the change.

The first was Sputnik. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space. The U.S. military, fearful it was losing the Cold War, began investing heavily in science, sending large sums to top research universities. By the ’60s, the race had accelerated, but engineers were in short supply, so the country began recruiting overseas. Starting in 1950, India, in collaboration with foreign partners, had begun building world-class engineering schools called the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Well-trained, English-speaking engineers began graduating just as the U.S. was desperate for them.

India had hoped that these engineers would help drive its own development, but it offered too few jobs, and the U.S. had found an ideal recruiting ground. Even today, the IITs remain fiercely selective, accepting less than 1 percent of roughly 1 million applicants per year. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google; Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, are all IIT graduates. The first wave of Indian engineers was recruited after 1965. A second big wave came in the late ’90s, during Y2K preparations.

The second development was a need for doctors. In July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare and Medicaid Act, and almost overnight, 20 million Americans became eligible for health care. Hospitals lacked the staff to cope. The Vietnam War was escalating, medical personnel were being sent to the front, and disabled veterans were returning home needing long-term care. Hospitals looked overseas, and India again supplied trained professionals to a strained system. Indian doctors were on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s and the coronavirus pandemic in the early 2020s.

[Meenakshi Ahamed: America has never really understood India]

The U.S. has benefited from the skills that Indians bring without having had to invest much in their education. Many have earned advanced degrees in America, but the bulk of their training happened in India. A more honest way to see it is that India, along with other poorer countries, has been subsidizing the United States.

Presidents like to define their eras with a slogan that conveys the legacy they hope to leave. John F. Kennedy called his the “New Frontier.” He was determined to win the Cold War and stop the spread of communism, and pushed the country toward space exploration while investing in science and technology. Johnson’s was the “Great Society.” His goal was to care for the elderly and the poor. Having known poverty firsthand, he wanted to extend health care to the vulnerable, and he signed both the Medicare and the Civil Rights Acts. Both of these presidents’ visions leaned on importing talent from abroad.

Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again.” Yet one of his lasting legacies may be that he turned his back on the very talent that helped make America great in the first place.

Wes Streeting wants the public to prepare for extreme weather, cyber attacks, and war

When both Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base were closed as active American military facilities in the early 1990s, the Philippines was said to be the sick man of US alliances. The same Philippines now seems to have emerged as America’s pivot in the Indo-Pacific.

General Ronald Clark, Commander of US Army Pacific, made it clear in an October 18 interview with the Financial Times that the Philippines, alongside Japan and South Korea, is central to US deterrence against hostile forces (implying China) in the Indo-Pacific.

The commander of US Army Pacific, a component of Indo-Pacific Command, said he wanted to demonstrate more “exquisite” military capabilities to help “show the adversary some things that they should be concerned about.”

As part of that push, US Army Pacific has expanded its role, including by temporarily deploying weapons in the Philippines, Japan, and other parts of the region that would play a critical role in a war with China, including over Taiwan, according to General Clark.

He revealed how Typhon, a mobile missile launch system that fires SM-6 missiles at ships, and Tomahawks that could strike parts of coastal China from the Philippines, have been used in recent joint exercises with the Philippines.

The US Army has also been using the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) in ways designed to send a clear message to China about the joint military capabilities of America and its allies, Clark said.

Mentioning an exercise earlier this year in which the army moved long-range precision weapons from the US to the Philippines and brought ammunition from South Korea for a live-fire mission, Gen. Clark stressed that it was important for deterrence.

“It causes them to go: ‘Hey, this is something that we have to think about,’” he said,  adding, “You can see it operate and we can do it at scale at a time and place of our choosing. So, you reveal capability in order to give your adversary pause.”

Incidentally, in an earlier conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Gen. Clark, who commands 107,000 soldiers, talked about the “tyranny of distance” that made it impossible to fight China with just air and naval power.

He argued that China’s vast geographic expanse and its anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities make it impossible or too risky to rely solely on air and naval power.

Here, Gen. Clark argues that the Philippines’ geography is a major advantage. The country’s 7,641 islands sit near vital maritime routes, the South China Sea, and the Luzon Strait/Taiwan Strait, making it an irreplaceable staging ground for US surveillance, logistics, and coastal defense.

From Batanes in northern Luzon—100 miles from Taiwan—to Palawan facing the Spratlys in the south, the archipelago locks the two hottest flashpoints: the north controls the Taiwan Strait, and the south controls the South China Sea.

For the US  military, it is the only territory that can monitor both the Taiwan Strait and the West Philippine Sea simultaneously. The archipelago can thus complicate the movement of Chinese naval forces from their coastal waters into the wider Pacific.

Incidentally, America is rebuilding its military presence in the Philippines after its 1992 withdrawal.

China Outbuilt the U.S. by Over 2X in Naval Tonnage in 2024–25. How Did Beijing Outpace America?

The return to Subic Bay and the expansion of US military cooperation across the Philippines mark a major strategic reversal. Washington is once again developing access to facilities that can support its operations in the western Pacific.

The US has access to nine Philippine military sites under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) and is investing more than $300 million to upgrade infrastructure.

However, all 9 (nine) bases are owned by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), but the US has been granted rotational access. The first 5 (five) were agreed in 2014, with 4 (four being added later in 2023 by President Marcos Jr. to deal with threats from the South China Sea.

The nine sites are being turned into A2/AD nodes that complicate any Chinese movement through the First Island Chain.

Notably, rather than building massive permanent bases, the US and the Philippines are building a flexible, distributed network that complicates targeting by China and raises the costs of a potential conflict (“deterrence by denial”).

Viewed thus, it is understandable why the US has introduced, as seen in Gen. Clark’s  FT interview,  advanced mobile-strike and missile systems such as the Typhon mid-range missile system into the Philippines, capable of reaching targets in the South China Sea and southern China.

One could further argue that Gen. Clark’s interview was not about the Philippines alone. It was about a new American way of fighting a war in the Indo-Pacific that is distributed, land-based, visible, and anchored on three democracies of  Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. That is why he put the Philippines in the same sentence as Japan and Korea.

One can thus surmise that, in a future contingency arising from Chinese actions, Japan will provide airfields, South Korea ammunition, and the Philippines firing positions.

This aligns with the US 2026 National Defense Strategy that EurAsian Times explained earlier. The idea is to build “a strong denial defense” along the First Island Chain.

In this scheme of things, Japan is the northern anchor — with long-range missiles, US-Japan command integration, and bases. South Korea is the arsenal and logistics hub — Clark himself cited a live-fire exercise in the Philippines using ammunition brought from South Korea, showing how Korean stockpiles now sustain Philippine operations.

The Philippines is the southern anchor and now a vital Indo-Pacific center for the US. The 12th Philippines-United States Bilateral Strategic Dialogue, held in Manila on February 16, 2026, officially reaffirmed both allies’ commitment to maintaining a vigilant posture, strengthening deterrence across the First Island Chain, and keeping critical sea lanes open.

Apparently, Washington is not only institutionalizing this triangle, the US, Japan, and the Philippines, but also widening its scope by involving Australia and forming the “Squad.”

The Squad’s core focus is to counter maritime pressure and escalation in the South China Sea and East China Sea and reinforce freedom of navigation.

Accordingly, defense officials and defense chiefs from the four nations have increasingly aligned through mini-lateral dialogues, joint exercises (such as Balikatan), and security assistance packages (including transfers of Japanese warships and patrol aircraft to the Philippine Navy).

The developments above make it clear that the Philippines has become the centerpiece of Washington’s strategy to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. As Elbridge Colby, US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said this year, Manila is Washington’s “model ally”.

In his words, “When our partners are strong, deterrence is strong. And that is exactly what we have here in Manila, under the leadership of President Marcos, Secretary of National Defense Teodoro, and other key leaders. We see and respect a resolute and proud nation that is determined to strengthen its own capabilities to better defend itself and its interests. A model ally.”

The Philippines now strengthens America’s network of strategic positions running from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Both are developing capabilities intended to make Chinese military operations more difficult, costly, and uncertain.

But as explained above, that is in a manner that affords more operational flexibility for America through access to ports, airfields, and other facilities that can help US forces disperse, sustain operations, and respond more quickly during a crisis, without depending on a small number of major bases.

In other words, thirty-four years after losing its sovereign bases in the Philippines in 1992, the US military has returned with comparable power, but by shifting its status from a base owner to a rotational guest.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• The author can be reached at prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Three Decades After Subic Bay Withdrawal, U.S. Military Returns to the Philippines With a New Model to Check China appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

Company ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push

Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.

After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.

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Kristin Idaszak | Longreads | October 22, 2026 | 3,741 words (13 minutes)

The city of the dead is the obverse of the society of the living, or rather than the obverse, it is its image, its intemporal image. For the dead have gone through the moment of change, and their monuments are the visible sign of the permanence of their city.

—Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death

Shortly after I graduated from college, my best friend sent me a postcard from the Sedlec Ossuary, a Catholic chapel formally named the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutná Hora, a town about an hour east of Prague. The postcard depicted the chapel’s interior: a chandelier of bones flanked by two towers of skulls. On the back she wrote, “The chandelier alone contains all the bones in the human body. Thanks to the plague, we have this work of totally weird art!” 

Immediately I started planning my own trip to Kutná Hora—a place made prosperous by silver mining but famous for its bone church—and arrived with the zeal of a pilgrim. Today the town has 20,000 residents, but in its 14th-century heyday it boasted almost four times as many souls. The late Middle Ages was a tough time to be alive, between the Black Death, various crusades and holy wars, and famine—not to mention the labor conditions of silver mining. Kutná Hora was also a popular place to die, and all the villagers wanted to spend eternity at the medieval Sedlec Abbey. After one of the crusades, an abbot had brought back a handful of soil, supposedly from Golgotha, and strewn it on the abbey grounds. Burial in that soil was believed to grant quicker access to heaven, which led to an overcrowded cemetery. The solution? Build a subterranean chapel to house the remains. And then a half-blind monk, in the wake of a terrible plague, exhumed the victims and used them to redecorate. 

An ossuary is any repository for human remains, but it’s also the term for a holy site that serves this function. Another name for this kind of church is charnel house, which to me evokes the image of an abattoir. Death historian Philippe Ariès connects the term to the French idiom une vieille carne, translated as an old nag or a tough piece of meat. It’s apropos: These buildings enshrine human remains as décor in macabre, otherworldly, electrifying memento mori. 

Four months later, I found myself in the Czech Republic. A coat of arms made out of bones greeted me when I arrived at the bone church. Upon closer inspection, the heraldry included a skeletal bird, its slender beak playfully pecking out a long-disintegrated eye from an empty socket. As I descended the stygian steps from the ticket kiosk, I took in the pyramid of bones that guarded the four corners of the room. 

The chapel seemed to exist in a perpetual gloaming, the air hushed and cool. The sheer presence of so many human remains disoriented me; they surrounded me on every side. Forty-thousand bodies’ worth of bones. Probably more. My brain buckled at the magnitude. The remains took on an animated quality—not in a Halloween-y, top hat–wearing, dancing skeleton sense; nor in an eerie, horror movie sense; but in the sense that each one radiated a life force.

I loved it. I loved being surrounded by skeletons and weird art and death.

Death and the afterlife fascinated me. I devoured stories of women who visited the underworld and returned—Alcestis, Eurydice, Persephone—and philosophers and poets who broached the subject—Nietzsche, Camus, Dante. Thanatos, my favorite philosophy professor called it. The death drive. But I had no sense of the fragility of my own body. My knees did not yet make those alarming soft pops; the permanent ache had not settled into my shoulder; my heart wouldn’t sputter erratically in my chest for another decade. The allure was intellectual and emotional, certainly not embodied. Like climate change or menopause, I understood mortality conceptually, but it didn’t feel real.

I’d like to tell you that my visit to the Sedlec Ossuary changed everything, that after my trip I appreciated life’s transitory nature. Or that it gave me a premonition of what lay in store for me, my own brushes with death that were to come.

It did not.

While I was underground, I felt temporarily transported and transformed—or at least, I had a flicker of understanding: I sauntered into the chapel with the hubristic notion of a young artist that my words would become immortal. The bones confronted me with the truth. My legacy would be deposits of calcium and protein and collagen. My art wouldn’t endure, but these nameless victims of plague and famine and war—they did. It humbled me.

But I left the ossuary’s insights with the dead. In my early 20s, I didn’t need the bone church to convince me to suck the marrow out of each day. I went to grad school, became a playwright, got married, traveled to all seven continents. Somewhere in there, I relegated the bone chapel to memory.

In the summer of 2020, I got sick with a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia called ventricular tachycardia. I had so many episodes of VT I lost count, and any one of them could have ended in cardiac arrest. These events were indescribably painful and frightening. They enervated me, sapping me of my strength, vitality—eventually my will to persevere. My life became very small.

Mortality was no longer an abstraction: I was scared of what would happen to me when I died. Of how much it hurt. Of the nothingness of bones.

In the years that followed my initial descent into illness, I rarely left home. At the time I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, a third-floor walk-up. Climbing the stairs could, unpredictably, trigger a cardiac event, and so unless I had to leave for work, I spent most of the time in my living room. I can close my eyes now and return to that place. I’d painted the walls a shade of cornflower blue I grew to loathe. The television tottered precariously on an ancient table. Cherry-stained bookcases lined the wall. The top of the bookcase displayed a golden Japanese fan with a cloud tree painted on it. Next to it stood a penguin pitcher I bought on my honeymoon in Tierra del Fuego. Three vintage-style travel posters advertised Antarctic destinations: Beagle Channel, Lemaire Channel, Paradise Harbor.

That room was the real ossuary. 

One of my favorite Greek tragedies is Euripides’ Alcestis, in which the eponymous heroine journeys to Hades in her dying husband’s stead. The god Apollo tricks the Fates so that her husband, the king, can live if he can find someone to take his place in the underworld. There’s an exchange I think about a lot: “Possible to say she is both alive and dead,” her servant reports, and the chorus leader, understandably confused, asks, “How could someone die and keep on living?” This is how I felt—alive but dead. Already in Hades. I’d escaped my fate, like the king, but my true self, the intrepid, curious, wonderstruck version of me? She was in the underworld with Alcestis.

The play takes a strange turn when Heracles arrives amid his twelve labors. During a supremely awkward evening of drunken revelry at the palace, he figures out what’s going on and hustles to the graveyard to wrestle death and bring Alcestis back. 

I didn’t have a demigod to save me. But I didn’t want to be lost and gone. 

Sitting in my apartment day after day, surrounded by artifacts from the world I used to inhabit, was slowly killing me. I was afraid of things that had caused my VT, which meant I was afraid to go to the grocery store. I was afraid of taking a yoga class. I was afraid to simply be outside if it was really hot out. Finally I reached a breaking point. I could drop dead in the peanut butter aisle, or I could drop dead seeing the world. Staying at home wouldn’t save me. The threat resided inside my own chest.

I formulated a drastic plan to return to the land of the living. I took time off teaching and planned a sabbatical to travel and write. I couldn’t hide in my house if I rented it to someone else, if I jetted to the other side of the world. Instead of crossing the River Styx I ferried myself across the Pacific Ocean, and then the Atlantic. The final stop on my sabbatical was leading a study abroad in the Czech Republic, to attend an international scenography and performance festival. The ossuary didn’t really fit into the rest of the itinerary, but I wanted to give my students the experience I’d had all those years ago. 

Though contemporary visitors can experience ossuaries as disturbing or revolting, they didn’t start out that way. In The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses, Paul Koudounaris traces their proliferation in Europe during the 13th century as a storage solution to the medieval Christian problem of where to keep the dead safe for their resurrection. There were more bodies than places to put them. Death preoccupied the medieval imagination. After the Bubonic plague, medieval artists began portraying its grotesque physicality: images of rotting corpses, poetic descriptions of worm fodder. You get the sense they would’ve painted the stench if they could. Is it any wonder that these decomposed cadavers eventually became the artistic medium itself? 

Dozens of bone chapels sprang up across Europe by the 17th century, in a confluence of theology and aesthetics that seems morbidly inevitable. During the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism leaned into opulent and lavish Baroque art. It also leaned into corporal mortification, the kind that now shows up in mass-market thrillers as a fetishization of pain and suffering. 

The appetite for gaudy-verging-on-gauche bone art swelled when the Romantics arrived on the scene in the 19th century. Gothic literature supplanted the medieval Ars Moriendi; a secular touchstone of this cultural moment is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Today, the Sedlec Ossuary has benefitted—or suffered from—the kitschification of gothic art, popping up in surprising places like The Young and the Restless and the “uninvolving and cliché-ridden” vampire B movie Blood and Chocolate.

Romanticism also marked the rise of a phenomenon now known as “dark tourism,” which refers to the practice of visiting sites associated with disaster, war, atrocity. Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon coined the term in 1996, in reference to tourism spawned by John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Scholars often point to concentration camps and Chernobyl as the field’s quintessential sites. Yet it’s a concept as old as tourism itself, dating back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims travel to the site of Thomas Becket’s murder. During the Grand Tours of the Romantic era, visits to places like the Paris catacombs (an underground labyrinth containing the bones of some six million people) and Pompeii (mass grave by way of volcano) came into vogue as a way to cultivate the Sublime. 

It can’t be an accident that this coincided with the proliferation of ossuaries. I have to believe not everyone went to charnel houses for the sake of holy contemplation. Prurience is not an invention of the digital age, even if we have elevated it to new heights (or denigrated it to new social media-inflected nadirs). I imagine gentlewomen in whalebone corsets and dilettantish young men titillating their companions with stories of the macabre.

The contemporary case for dark tourism—sometimes called thanatourism—is that it refutes any attempt to forget or whitewash history. It’s one of the few ways we can meaningfully encounter death and atrocity. Before I got sick, I went to Auschwitz as well as Hiroshima. The power of these sites is undeniable. They serve as monuments to some of modern history’s darkest moments and have been carefully transformed into vehicles for education, reflection, and solemn commemoration. I went because it felt important to bear witness to the horrific crimes against humanity that occurred there. But I’ve also participated in dark tourism less consciously, and perhaps you have, too. I’ve seen an Ai Weiwei art installation at Alcatraz, toured the Colosseum where murder was a matinée, peeked into the bakeries and brothels of Pompeii, strolled through Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. I skipped Hell’s Museum, which a friend recommended in Singapore, and wish I’d skipped a ghost tour of Savannah, Georgia—what made it haunting was the way the city’s bloody history of enslavement and oppression was repurposed as entertainment for partiers carrying to-go cups of watered-down vodka.

The counterargument is self-evident: It leaves these sensitive sites vulnerable to exploitation. The suffering of one group commodified as a cocktail party anecdote for another. The exit through the gift shop. 

It would be a neat narrative if the newest wave of dark tourism had gained traction after the pandemic, when there was a momentary reintegration of death in our day-to-day. In actuality, it flourished before COVID spread, before ambulances drove through empty city streets and bodies piled up in overcrowded mortuaries, before corpses were stashed in refrigerated trucks in New York City because the morgues were beyond capacity. And now, when those months and years have receded like a bad dream and no lessons were learned, it’s hard to attribute a newfound reverence for mortality to this renewed appetite for dark tourism. 

I never thought about what I was doing as morbid. I gravitated to many of these attractions unconsciously, often because I wanted to understand history—and history is littered with corpses. But I think back uneasily to the casual way these sites were slotted into my itineraries. I remember the okonomiyaki place I went to after the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the hole-in-the-wall with the cheerfully ursine line cook, but not how I possibly could’ve been hungry.

The impetus for this flavor of tourism isn’t monolithic. Some dark tourists are processing their personal or ancestral experiences, some are genuinely curious, some don’t even realize they’re doing it, and some are rubberneckers. Regardless of motivation, one effect of present-day dark tourism under global capitalism is the Disneyfication of death.

The first months of my sabbatical were rocky. Fear dogged me through the streets of Sydney, Mumbai, Athens. A few weeks before I went back to the Czech Republic to lead my study abroad, I went to another bone chapel, in a small town east of Lisbon called Évora. Visitors flock to Évora for its prehistoric megaliths and Roman temple to Diana, but I’d driven across Portugal to see the charnel house. My GPS misled me through the hot, dusty town, and I circled around the temple and its remaining Corinthian columns—which seemed dropped into the town square like an abandoned film set—until I found the Capela dos Ossos.

The 17th-century Capela has more bling than Sedlec, from azulejo tiles to ceiling frescoes, with skulls where cherubs might usually repose. (Other charnel houses put the Capela to shame in their ostentation, such as the skeletons at the German Basilica of Waldsassen wearing jewel-encrusted gold costumes, which were originally posed with chalices with dried blood at their feet.) The chapel is crammed, floor to illustrious ceiling, with​ bones stacked horizontally, so only the knobs show. Lined with osteological columns, the architecture echoes the ruined temple to the pagan goddess in the town beyond. Before you even enter there’s a Dantean inscription: Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos. 

We bones that are here await yours. 

I found the inscription strangely comforting as I entered the inner chamber. The first interpretive sign explained the function of a bone chapel as a memento mori: “It is expected to serve as a consolation to some and news to others.” 

Lucky them, I thought.

I appreciated the aesthetics of the Capela dos Ossos, but it lacked the Hadean quality that engendered my near-mystic experience at the Sedlec Ossuary. Afterward, I continued on my sabbatical still mistrustful of my body, still afraid to move through the world. 

But when I got to Prague, something shifted. It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t walk into the bone chapel and have an epiphany. A logjam loosened in my psyche. Shepherding a group of young adults in a foreign country, I couldn’t hide in the hotel or confine myself to strictly prescribed routes and routines. For many of them it was their first trip overseas, and overwhelmed, they looked to me for guidance. 

At 7 a.m. one morning, 20 students piled onto a bus to Kutná Hora. On the drive, I strove to impart my love of bone churches: Ossuaries aren’t morbid (okay, well, they are, but they’re not only morbid); they highlight the brevity of our lives to help us live more intentionally. But in a kind of punk rock way. Carpe fucking diem. The students were curious but respectful. Some found it moving, others creepy. 

When we arrived, the bone chapel was different than I remembered. Tentatively, I descended into the brightly lit space below. In the open area of the chapel, monitors now played a video of renovators handling the bones. The video explained a restoration project to shore up the building’s structural integrity and preserve the skeletons. The foundation is unstable and has started sinking since it was built sometime in the 14th century. In the Baroque period the Czech-Italian architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel redesigned the ossuary as it exists today, and it wasn’t until the 1860s that a carpenter named František Rint created the bone art, including the famous chandelier and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms that reproduced the heraldry of the local aristocrats. 

That wasn’t the origin story I’d learned years ago, about the monk and the plague—was the monk even real? The crepuscular lighting and gloom were gone. Where was the ambience? How could you commune with the dead like this?

Behind me, another busload of tourists arrived, and another, and another. Tourists overran the chapel, their guides speaking into little microphones in various languages while they snapped photo after photo. At the entrance, the lone employee said in English, no photos allowed. Everybody ignored her. 

Snap. 

Desensitized, they gawked without seeing. 

Snap. 

No photos, repeated the ticket taker. 

Snap.

The scores of tour groups weren’t part of my memory. 

Through a side door I climbed the stairs into an outdoor cemetery. The videos of the restorers kept replaying in my mind. It’s one thing to envision an apocryphal monk constructing pyramids of bones, it’s another to watch footage of archaeologists cleaning them and then putting them back in the pile. One of my students was minoring in archaeology and, as we strolled through the cemetery, she told me that ethical and legal restrictions governed archaeologists’ handling of human remains. It was obvious once she said it, but I hadn’t thought about it. The videos had close-ups of hands in nitrile gloves cleaning the dirt off the bones. Afterward, the bones were soaked in lime solution, which is also how Rint first prepared them in the 1860s. His chlorinated lime solution is the reason the Sedlec Ossuary’s decorations have remained relatively white over the years, while bones in other ossuaries have browned with age. The archaeologists also have the benefit of video mapping to help them rebuild the pyramids once the bones are cleaned and restored. 

It must take incredible dedication for these archaeologists to put themselves in this proximity with death. To sustain that intimacy day after day—I know the cost. 

I resented the crowd of tourists I’d left thronging the chapel. More than that, I felt a sense of superiority. Now that I was ready for the ossuary to transform me, I’d found an atmosphere that was more carnivalesque than sacred. 

But as I meandered among the headstones in the fresh air, it occurred to me: Did I really think that none of those tourists had ever lost a parent or child or partner, ever grieved, ever had a near-death experience of their own? Did I really think my proximity to death, my awareness of its phalanges drumming on my shoulder, had given me some privileged access to the charnel house’s true meaning? To the contrary, after I got sick, I guarded my life like a dragon hoarding a treasure pile in a dark cave, and it moldered away, unspent. Those bones had more vivacity than I did. 

For the medieval peasants whose skeletons limned the walls, death was a prolonged nap until everyone woke up during the rapture. There was a fluidity between death and the afterlife. These days it seems so much more final. (Per Ariès, once it was tame and now it is wild.) Much has been made of the deathbed’s move in modern society from the home to the hospital: out of sight, out of mind. Ossuaries thrust mortality squarely in your line of vision. They ask that you regard death as a transition, not a terminus. Not something to guard against hyper-vigilantly, but a natural part of a cosmic continuum. 

It was time to live again.

Going back to the Sedlec Ossuary was not some purifying rite. It was an ordinary day. The tourists streamed past me, discussing where they were going for lunch. The ​students had moved on, browsing for trinkets at the shop across the street. I recoiled at the kitschy skull mugs and shot glasses, but when I got home, I wished I had a memento mori to put next to the penguin.  

After Heracles brings Alcestis back from the underworld, she’s silent for the remainder of the play. Still sacred to the god of the dead, she cannot speak until three days have gone by, Heracles explains. I think there might be other reasons she stays silent. Maybe she preferred it down there. Maybe she left some irretrievable part of herself behind. Maybe she found the light above a little too harsh, the music too loud, the colors too saturated; found herself attracted to dusk, to intertidal zones, lintels, liminal spaces. Or maybe she has nothing left to say.

When I got home, I went through my old photos. I couldn’t figure out if my memories of Sedlec were real until I found a photo of myself, painfully young, standing in the semi-dark underneath the chandelier, its bones glowing white—either from the camera flash or an out-of-frame light source. I look half-happy, half-haunted, like I’m about to say something, but I can’t remember what.

Kristin Idaszak is an internationally produced and award-winning playwright and essayist whose recent work explores the intersection of ecology and chronic illness. She is a 3Arts Awardee, two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow, and the former Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Goodman Theatre. She received the Kennedy Center ACTF Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. Her essays appear in The American Scholar, Fourth Genre, HowlRound, and elsewhere.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
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