Chinese ‘ghost brides’
The Chinese concept of ‘ghost brides’ is an outlawed rural tradition that demonstrates the wide gap between the industrial giant that is China, and its rural classes. Reform in China, the most populous nation in the world, is not necessarily a simplistic process. While change can be effected in the thriving cities, among the educated, and the industrialized workers, life in remote rural China continues as it has for centuries. A Chinese tradition is that if a young man dies unwed, his family will try to find him a ‘ghost bride’, a similarly aged young woman who also died, so that they can spend the afterlife together. This rather quaint concept however has a darker side. The families are willing to pay for ghost brides, and sometimes the corpses of the deceased are removed without the families position to be buried alongside their new ghost groom. The Chinese authorities have been trying to ban the practice sine the time of Chairman Mao, but it is still practices in some remote communities.
Five people have been arrested in China for digging up the corpse of a young woman to be a “ghost bride” for a man killed in a car crash.
The suspects included a grieving father who allegedly paid his four accomplices around £2,700 pounds to find a female to be his son’s companion in the afterlife.
The men were caught after unearthing the remains of a teenage girl who had poisoned herself after failing her university entrance exams last year, a newspaper in Xianyang in China’s Shaanxi province reported.
In rural China, superstitious villagers have for centuries sought out the bodies of recently deceased woman to be ghost brides for young men who die single
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