BEIJING — China cremated its only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, on Saturday, but watchful officials allowed only his widow and a few other mourners to bid farewell to the man who was also the country’s most famous political prisoner.
Later in the day, Mr. Liu’s ashes were lowered into the sea in a simple ceremony, ensuring that there would be no grave on land to serve as a magnet for protests against the Communist Party, especially on the traditional tomb-sweeping day every April.
“As Mozart’s Requiem played, Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, first came forward to stand before his body,” according to an official account of the funeral emailed by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “She gazed upon him for a long time and murmured her final farewells to her husband.”
The mourners bowed three times before Mr. Liu’s body, and Ms. Liu and other family members bowed three times again, the account said. After the cremation, “Ms. Liu received the container of ashes and tightly hugged it to herself,” it said.
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Mr. Liu’s small, muted funeral in the early morning hours in Shenyang, a city 390 miles northeast of Beijing, took place three days after he died of liver cancer at the age of 61. The funeral respected local customs and his family’s wishes, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported.
The ceremony, however, like Mr. Liu’s final days in a hospital, was a paradoxical display of the efforts by the Chinese government to defend its treatment of him and his wife, even as it had kept them and their family members under tight guard. The family members were mostly unable to say whether they accepted the government’s account of their treatment.
An exception was Liu Xiaoguang, Mr. Liu’s eldest brother, whom officials escorted to an afternoon news conference in Shenyang, where he expressed thanks for the Communist Party’s handling of Mr. Liu’s treatment and funeral, and said that he supported the idea of dropping the ashes into the sea.
“I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the party and government for completely following the family’s wishes,” said Mr. Liu, a former manager in a garment trading company. He repeated that view two more times during the news conference. Liu Xiaobo’s medical treatment, he said, “showed the superiority of our country’s socialist system.”
Mr. Liu’s widow, he added, was too fragile with grief to speak to the news media.
Many friends and supporters of the dissident were revolted and incensed by Mr. Liu’s cremation and sea burial under such intimidating controls.
“Inhuman, insult, shameful, disgusting,” Ai Weiwei, the outspoken Chinese artist, who lives in Germany, said on Twitter.