Rural families revive trade in corpse brides
Print Edition
THEFTS of dead bodies are on the rise in rural Shanxi with the old custom of “ghost marriage” resurfacing in the northern Chinese province.
Shanxi’s Hongtong County has reported at least three dozen thefts of female corpses in the past three years, said Lin Xu, deputy director of the county’s police department.
In ghost marriage rituals, female skeletons are reinforced with steel wire and clothed before they are buried alongside dead bachelors as “ghost brides.” Many rural families believe that failure to find a burial partner for unmarried male relatives brings bad luck.
The government ordered an end to the practice after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. However, people in the countryside, who tend to uphold old customs and rituals, continued the practice using pictures or dummies made of paper or dough.
As people got richer, the practice of using real corpses has returned to some rural villages in Shanxi, north China’s Henan Province and Shaanxi Province in the country’s northwest.
Chang Sixin, deputy director of the China Folk Literature and Art Association, said there were even matchmaking agents and companies profiting from pairing dead bachelors with women’s corpses.
In Quting, Jing Gouzi said he had bought a corpse to be buried with his older brother, who was single. “I thought of using a woman made of dough, but the old men in our village insisted only real bodies could prevent bad luck,” he said.
Under Chinese criminal law, anyone who steals or defiles a corpse faces up to three years in prison. But that has failed to deter the traffickers in dead bodies, Lin said.
A fresh female corpse can fetch up to 100,000 yuan (US$15,600), and even a body buried for decades can be sold for around 5,000 yuan.
The rise in thefts has raised concerns. In Shengou, families are building tombs near their homes, rather than at distant mountain sites. Some families have hired guards to watch over tombs, reinforced them with steel or installed surveillance cameras.
Jiang Guolong, who lives in Dongbao, discovered his grandmother’s body was missing last February. “I was close with my grandmother all my life, and now I cannot find her remains,” he said.
Another Hongtong County resident, Guo Qiwen, is looking for his mother’s body, stolen last March. “I have spent more than 50,000 yuan looking for her remains. It kills my heart not having her back,” he said.
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