From the “yellow-earth highlands of western China” comes a disturbing story that involves an ancient Chinese belief—a belief “that young men who die unmarried should go to their graves accompanied by deceased women who will be their wives in the afterlife.”  “Often these women die natural deaths,” says a Reuters report of 25 January.

But then, sometimes they don’t:

Chinese police have arrested three men for killing two young women to sell their corpses as ‘ghost brides’ for dead single men, a Chinese newspaper reported, warning the dark custom might have claimed many other victims.
[…]
Yang Donghai, a 35-year-old farmer in western China’s Shaanxi province, confessed to killing a woman bought from a poor family for 12,000 yuan ($1,545) last year.
[…]
She thought she was being sold into an arranged marriage, but Yang killed her in a gully and sold her corpse for 16,000 yuan, the Legal Daily reported Thursday. He and two accomplices then killed a prostitute and sold her for 8,000 yuan before police caught them.
[…]
‘I did it for the money; it was a quick buck,’ Yang said, according to the paper. ‘If I hadn’t slipped up early, I planned to do a few more.’

Now if that isn’t a sincere expression of repentance, I’ve never heard one….

Yang and his buddies sold the bodies of the women to a local undertaker, Li Longsheng, who specialized “in buying and selling the dead women [needed] for ghost weddings.”  The Reuters article has no information on the current status of this undertaker, or whether he even knew that he had purchased murder victims.  Oddly enough, the article makes no comment as to the legality of the sale of “legitimate corpses” (people who die of natural causes?) in China.

This isn’t the first gory tale I’ve heard about undertakers in China.  Many years ago, I read a story about an undertaker in or near Beijing who would slice meat off the buttocks and thighs of corpses before he prepared them for burial.  The flesh yielded was sold at “reduced prices” to a popular Beijing lunch bistro, which ground it up and used it to stuff the restaurant’s famous wontons….

I wonder if Confucius ever heard of this “ghost bride” thing?  And if he did, I wonder what he thought about it.  It goes to show that having 5,000 years of history and tradition can be a bad thing sometimes.

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