ninme

The Times - Ghost brides are murdered to give dead bachelors a wife in the afterlife

A ring of gangsters who traded in the bodies of women they murdered, selling them as brides to keep dead bachelors happy in the afterlife, has been arrested in China. The arrests have exposed a trade that places a higher value on women when they are dead than when they are alive.

So, on the one hand I’m tremendously shocked, outraged, want an end to it, etc etc, but then on the other, how fascinating! Sorry, but seriously! It’s like a thriller novel for anthropologists. But real life!

The men preyed on the superstitions of ill-educated farmers eager to ensure that a dead son was happy in the afterlife. It is not uncommon in rural parts of China for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair.

Ancestor worship is a tradition that runs through many aspects of Chinese life. One of the main Chinese festivals is Tomb Sweeping Day, when families visit graves of their forebears to clean them and burn incense. The spirit is believed to live on in the afterlife and at funerals families burn offerings of paper money and models of houses, cars and other little luxuries that the dead may need.

Well, yeah, I knew that, but who knew about the women!? It’s like ancient Egypt. Meets pre-Raj India.

Fun-facts!

Fatal attraction

• Traditional Chinese belief holds that the living must tend to the wants and needs of dead relatives, who exist in an afterlife
• It is believed by some that an unmarried life is incomplete, leading to the practice of minghun — burying single sons with recently dead young women to provide them with a wife in the afterlife
• Parents of a dead daughter often regard the money received in selling her for minghun as recompense for the dowry that they did not receive in her lifetime, while also posthumously elevating their child’s place in a patriarchal society
• Communist authorities tried to ban the practice, which datesfrom the Zhou dynasty (1122-256BC). It was also forbidden in the Book of Rites, texts that describe religious practices from the eighth to the fifth century BC
• Minghun survives mainly in the poor rural north, particularly in the remote plateau on the upper reaches of the Yellow River

And the caption under the picture:

Actors as ghost bride and bridegroom: parents who make a spirit marriage for sons regard the dead bride’s family as in-laws

Fascinating. And yes, horrible and typical. What about the women’s happiness in the afterlife? Why don’t the men ever get murdered because some chick’s died?