BEHOLD CHINA'S LUXURIOUS PET CEMETRY WHERE PET OWNERS SPEND AS MUCH 230 BRITISH POUNDS PER SQ METRE TO BURY THEIR BELOVED PETS

'Our dog was very mystical,' Mr Yang says, snapping out of his sombre mood when asked what he loved about Big Baby. 'He used to protect my wife from danger. The day he passed away my wife's watch suddenly stopped without reason.'

The cemetery is exclusively for pets that have passed on to the other side. A plot at Baifu, which was founded in 2005 and is one of around 10 pet cemeteries in Beijing, costs 2,000 Yuan (£220) per square metre plus decoration costs and an annual 50 Yuan (£5.50) maintenance fee.

Owners such as Mr Yang and his wife Zhang Fan regularly visit their departed furry friends to keep their plots tidy and offer tributes. 

'We come here every few weeks to sweep the tomb, talk to Big Baby and bring him food,' says Mrs Zhang. 'We tell him that we love him the most, even though we have another dog now.'

Many people who have pets buried at Baifu are Buddhist, and believe that items they offer up to their dead animals will help them in the afterlife. Today Big Baby's owners pour him a huge bowl of dried dog food. It promptly gets eaten by one of the many cats that live in the cemetery grounds.

Gone but not forgotten: Big Baby's final resting place is lovingly tended by his owners, who have got a second dog - who they called Loving Baby, and 'raised in remembrance' 

Squeaky toys, brushes and collars are also popular tributes, and some of the more elaborate grave plots are piled high with colourful soft toys and packets of biscuits. A dog named Yang Yang's grave is scattered with lollipops.

Another plot features a photo of a panting white dog named Chinese Dumpling and an engraving: 'My angel of happiness, my eternal love'. It also has a plastic toy Mercedes Benz car perched on it.

'That's there because the dog's owner has that same car,' says Zhang Youwang, the cemetery's groundskeeper. 'The dog loved riding around in the car with him.'

Mr Jin and Mrs Wang, a couple, are also at Baifu tending to the grave of their Pekingese dog, Noisy. They are replacing his sun-faded photograph that lies next to the lettering: 'We will always love you. If there is an afterlife, we will raise you again there.' 

Joyful: Mr Jin holds a picture of his beloved late pet, Noisy. 'He was smart enough to recognise 116 different toys,' says Mr Jin, proudly. 'Whichever toy we'd tell him to get, he'd get it'

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China's Tomb Sweeping Day holiday, a time traditionally set aside for paying tribute to dead relatives with visits to their resting places, was earlier this month. 'We usually visit Noisy on Tomb Sweeping Day but this year we were elsewhere,' says Mr Jin. 'So today we've brought him some sausage and beef.'

The couple have brought a bucket of soapy water to wash down the plastic toys they have decorated Noisy's plot with. 'He was smart enough to recognise 116 different toys,' says Mr Jin, proudly. 'Whichever toy we'd tell him to get, he'd get it. We have a bigger dog now, whose name is similar to Noisy's in order to help us remember him.

'When Noisy died we went away travelling for a week to try and get over it,' says Mrs Wang. 'I treated him as my son because I only have a daughter. When he died it felt like I was losing a child.'

Due to China's recently relaxed single child policy families in the country tend to be small, perhaps leading to many Chinese having extreme attachments to their pets.

'We have this place as a way to meet the spiritual demand of people who lose their baby pets,' says Chen Shaochun, the cemetery's founder. 'It's justified to treat them as family members. People are emotional animals and often animals accompany them for a long time.'