A Market for Macabre Marriages

Posted at 11:29 AM, July 28, 2007 · No Comments

In following with the stereotypical British fascination for the morbid, the latest Economist reports on a cadaverous Chinese tradition:

Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a ?wedding? and bury the couple together.

The custom has a long history. In the legends of the classical romance of the ?Three Kingdoms?, the warlord Cao Cao finds a corpse bride for his son who died in 208 AD at the tender age of 13. [link]

Yes, they actually marry corpses to each other. So if you thought your spouse was a deadbeat, think again. But wait, it gets worse.

As a consequence of this tradition and the decline of Marxism – which suppressed these superstitions – a black market for corpse brides has emerged from the underground (sorry, couldn’t resist). The marketeers range from socially respectable marriage brokers (think: Chinese version of nosey Indian aunty who’s always trying to hook you up) who act as middlemen, to your usual suspects of grave-robbers including hospital workers, funeral parlors and the like.

There are “wet goods” (fresh corpses) and “dry goods” (buried for a while), with the former going for the equivalent of $4,000-$5,300 and the latter, for about a tenth of that. The prime markets for are the Shanxi and neighboring provinces, which are centers for coal-mining and where lots of unmarried young men fall to their deaths in the mining pits. After reading that, you really want to imbibe some wet goods – those that fall under the usual definition (“intoxicating liquors”), I mean.

The latest twist in the story? Something which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘make a killing on the market’. Yes, I’m talking murder. A guy was actually killing women to cater to the increasing demand.

Mr Song (whose name is a homonym for the phrase ?to send someone to heaven?) was jailed after he dropped his mobile phone at a grave he had plundered: the police used it to track him down. This January he was arrested again and confessed to strangling six women and selling their bodies. Killing for corpses, he said, was an easier way to make money than digging them out of the ground. [link]

Well, it was only a matter of time before someone actually took the next step – we Asians are known for our entrepreneurial (s)kills, after all…