China: Murdering brides for the marriage market of the dead
In January 2007, the police in Sha’anxi province in northern China arrested Yang Dongyan and his four accomplices. The gang had specialized in a macabre business. They murdered young women and sold them as brides for the spirits of unmarried dead men. Belief in an afterlife is common in China. Surviving family members see it as their duty to look after the needs and wishes of the spirits of their ancestors and deceased relatives ensure that they are comfortable in the other world. At funerals, fake money is burned as well as paper models of house or car and other things the deceased might need. When a young man dies before getting married and his family wants him to enjoy the company of a wife in the afterlife, they find a suitable dead bride and burry her along with him after performing a religious marriage ritual for the ghost couple. This practice called mighun has a tradition of more than two thousand five hundred years. Though it is legally banned today, it is still common among uneducated and superstitious villagers. Brokers strike secret deals between families of unmarried young men and families of unmarried young women. Selling a girl’s body for mighun makes her a married woman and elevates her social status. The money is taken as compensation for the dowry that her parents lost because of her death.
It is common in rural China to sell daughters for dowry to their future husbands or to intermediaries, who would pass them on with a profit margin. Some girls are sold several times before actually getting married. Yang Dongyan had been a bride trader earlier. When a handicapped girl he had bought did not sell well, he killed her and sold her with high profit margin for mighun. “It’s a quick way to make money”, he said remorselessly, when he was arrested. In some areas, a dead bride, if she is beautiful and in good condition, fetches up to four times more than a living one and handicaps or mental problems are no concern.
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