As Chinese honour dead ancestors, illegal practise of ghost marriages still lingers
Villagers are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of yuan for a female corpse to bury alongside an unmarried deceased male, Xinhua reports
As Chinese across the nation honour their ancestors by visiting their graves this week, state media has drawn attention to one ugly side of traditional views about death.
Xinhua ran a report about the black market trade in corpse-stealing, in which families obtain a dead woman to bury alongside an unmarried male so he will not be alone in the afterlife.
The practice, known as “ghost marriages”, was banned by the government in 1949 but continues to exist in remote villages, especially in the north.
The trade can be lucrative for criminals willing to source the bodies, sometimes by murder, with families willing to pay hundreds of thousands of yuan for a corpse.
In Hongtong, a county with a population of about 760,000 in Shanxi province, 27 female bodies have been reported stolen since 2013, according to the Xinhua report. But the actual number could be much higher, as some villagers might feel too ashamed to report to officials that a body of a deceased family member had gone missing.