Kang Cuicui of Cangzhou, Hebei Province, committed suicide 12 years ago by drinking paraquat and was buried in her in-laws’ ancestral tomb. In mid-November this year, the in-laws found out when sweeping the tomb that her corpse was stolen and there was only a big carrot in the tomb. Later, according to the police investigation, the body was stolen by Kang Cui Cui’s parents, who sold the body to others for 80,000 yuan to match the yin marriage.
After Fang Yang Yang, who was abused by her in-laws, the case of Kang Cui Cui reignited the discussion on the custom of yin marriage. Searching for “yin marriage” on the Chinese Judicial Documents website, 138 judgments related to yin marriage can be collected, excluding unrelated cases. In criminal cases, yin marriage involves murder and corpse theft; in civil cases, the cost of yin marriage is often used as a bargaining chip to gain an advantage when fighting for property.
The faces of the deceased in these cases are blurred, and the women are more like tools or commodities than independent beings, used by their families in exchange for benefits.
1.
/revival of custom/
A cab drives through the night with a middle-aged man on the passenger side wearing a floral shirt. Four passengers are crammed into the back row, three old men in their 60s and 70s sandwiching the young girl in the middle. The girl looked dazed and smelled bad. The driver opened the window, the wind was very loud, the old people whispered through the wind.
Car on the highway, the back of the old man Ding Shengli took out a blue striped towel, covering the girl’s mouth and nose. See the girl twisted her head to avoid, Ding Shengli called his companion to help pull her right hand. Help the old woman felt the girl was subconsciously trembling, they were scared to let go of the hand. Ding Shengli called the other two to help, were excused. Twenty to thirty seconds later, he threw the towel at his feet and stopped the murder.
For the girl, it was a trip with no return. Her name is Chen Tiantian, 18 years old, and she was found at a train station when she was less than a year old by a couple from Weinan, Shaanxi province, who brought her home to raise her. She had congenital cerebral palsy, was unable to speak and was bedridden for years. The couple felt the pressure of raising her and unsuccessfully searched for a matchmaker. On the advice of the matchmaker, they came up with the idea of matching Chen Tantan with a Yin marriage.
Through seven intermediaries, including Ding Shengli, they contacted a family in Shanxi. The other party had come to Weinan to negotiate and learned that Chen Tantan was still alive, and immediately drove back to Shanxi. Subsequently, a middleman told Ding Shengli that as long as the girl died, the procedures were complete and placed in the hospital morgue, the man could still be contacted to pull the plug.
The next day, Ding Shengli used 2,000 yuan to buy a fake death certificate, and prepared a letter of attorney for voluntary marriage with Yin, to Chen Tiantian’s adoptive father to sign. He put together 30,000 yuan, with 20,000 of them to Chen Tiantian’s adoptive parents, the rest to other intermediaries. Chen Tiantian was carried into a cab by her adoptive mother in tears and set out on this desperate road.
At 1:00 a.m., the car arrived in Huayin, a county-level city under Weinan, where Ding Shengli and others intended to put Chen Tiantian in the hospital morgue and let her freeze to death. The morgue manager found her alive with a flashlight and rebuked Ding Shengli and the others for having “too much guts” and kicked them out.
Chen Tiantian was moved back to the car and went to Shanxi. At 3:30 a.m., the car encountered a routine check in Shanxi, the police found the difference and saved her.
This was a case that happened in 2013, and among the hundreds of cases involving yin marriages, this was almost the worst in nature. In the end, Ding Shengli and other intermediaries and Chen Tiantian’s adoptive parents were found guilty of intentional homicide and sentenced to 3 to 7 years in prison.
The original match with Chen Tiantian was a boy who was involved in a car accident at the age of 21 and was unmarried. According to some local customs, after the death of an unmarried male, he needs to finish matching the yin marriage in order to pass on the offspring of his relatives to pass on the bloodline. And according to the order of eldest and youngest, the deceased brother finished matching the Yin marriage before the younger brothers could successfully marry. And unmarried women can not enter the ancestral graves, no one to worship, their angry spirits will visit the living relatives, bringing all kinds of misfortune.
The practice of yin marriage has been around for a long time, perhaps more than 3,000 years. A paper published in the Journal of Hunan University, “A Review of Underworld Marriages,” describes that there is an oracle bone record that the ruler of the Shang Dynasty married the deceased King Yin’s underworld wife, which is the earliest record of underworld marriages. This is the earliest record of a nuptial. The Rites of Zhou explicitly prohibits “moving burials and marriages”, so nuptial marriages were not carried out openly and were not included in the official history. At the end of the Han Dynasty, social unrest, rites and music, Yin marriage revived, the most famous story is Cao Cao’s favorite young son Cao Chong with Yin marriage. Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties, especially the Tang Dynasty, Yin wedding has become popular, up to the nobility, down to the common people, have been a big rise in this custom. By the Song Dynasty, full-time yin wedding matchmaker appeared.
Some scholars believe that the concept of widowhood and chastity was promoted in the Qing Dynasty, and that yin marriages declined, but were later catalyzed by reform and opening up and economic development, forming an industrial chain again. In recent decades, not only unmarried men and women with Yin marriage, married people can also do, some people think that after the death of the child, his or her spouse will remarry, do not want the child no one to be buried, become a lonely ghost.
Historical records, the Qing Dynasty, Yin wedding to Shanxi, until now, Shanxi is also the “hardest hit” Yin wedding. In the collected verdict, 38 cases occurred in Shanxi, accounting for 30% of the total, followed by Hebei, Shaanxi, 29 cases, 27 cases, Henan, Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Gansu and other places also have related cases.
These cases, someone due to debt on life hopeless, strangled his 10-year-old daughter, before and after the incident, he asked people to inquire about matching Yin wedding, and therefore was suspected by his wife, is greedy for the cost of Yin wedding and killed his daughter; someone in the deserted grasslands robbed his own sister, fearing that things were exposed, and forced to abduct the mentally retarded to his sister filled with pesticides, from before the robbery to after the murder, he several times to find people to negotiate the matter of Yin wedding, want to squeeze his sister dry The last value; some people mistake a male corpse in the same village as a grandmother’s bones dug up and sold to others to match the yin marriage; some people heard that their daughter’s body to be sold secretly by the in-laws, rushed to the buyer’s home and in-laws group fight, resulting in injuries ……
2.
/body-snatchers/
Nearly half of the convictions pointed to theft and sale of bodies, involving at least 106 body snatchers and 41 dumpers, far more of whom were men than women. Their education levels were generally low, with 2 having a high school education, 16 having a middle school education, and the rest being illiterate or elementary school educated, except for a few unmarked.
Most of them were motivated to make profit from it. A farmer in Shanxi was blind in his right eye, suffering from cerebral infarction with mild hemiplegia, living in dire straits, his ancestral house was in disrepair and collapsed, and he was living on loan in someone else’s house. He was prosecuted for stealing 1,070 yuan from a neighbor’s house, and after being spared criminal punishment, he sought to pick up his sister-in-law’s grave, carry away the bones, and sell them in the name of matchmaking for a profit of 10,000 yuan. A man who has been in prison in Jiangsu said he was “a small family child” and wanted to get some money to build a house, encouraged others to go to the cemetery together to steal the urn, to sell the ashes to others with the yin wedding The man threatened to sell the ashes to other people for marriage. A 68-year-old unemployed man in Heilongjiang pulled a woman’s body from a funeral home without the consent of the deceased’s family for 30,000 yuan and hired someone to transport it from Qiqihar, Heilongjiang, back to his home in Shandong, Texas, a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers.
Some defendants have become a part of the industrial chain. In recent years, the formation of Yin wedding industry chain in many places, the upstream is a group of open coffin to steal the body, or hospital mortuary, funeral home employees tipped off; midstream, some marriage practitioners learned that there is a market for Yin marriage, have crossed the border, part-time to do “ghost matchmaker “; downstream is a feng shui gentlemen, for both sides to choose the auspicious day, officiate at the ceremony, sometimes also involved in matchmaking.
In the 138 verdicts collected, these roles were present. A defendant from Yuncheng, Shanxi province, is a typical example of the upstream of the industry chain, having stolen 12 corpses from across the province in 2013 and 2014, and he had three regular “helpers” He had three regular “helpers. A funeral home employee in Henan province stole female corpses in between cremations and hid them in the freezer of the funeral home, and later sold them to others for marriage after being contacted by a downline. Another funeral home operator provided storage services for at least three stolen bodies and made a profit from them.
The middle and lower reaches of the chain are various types of dumpers. Liu Guodong, a laid-off employee, is a repeat offender of selling female corpses and has been jailed twice for stealing and selling corpses. 2018, he pulled another female corpse from the hospital for sale, and the buyer found that the age of the corpse did not match the previously agreed one and chose to call the police. Liu promised to immediately replace a young female corpse, drove alone to Linfen, Shanxi, bought back the female corpse he had previously sold to others and returned, and was caught red-handed. Police later discovered that he had purchased 22 female corpses for sale from his handler in Henan in less than a year.
Before 2015, most stolen corpses were sold for 20-30,000 yuan, up to 60,000 yuan, and usually shared by 2-5 people, with each person receiving less than 12,000 yuan. after 2015, the price of some stolen corpses rose to 60-100,000 yuan, but the number of participants who profited more than 20,000 yuan was still very small. The defendant who stole 12 corpses across the province, in addition to a male corpse brought back to burn, the other 11 were sold for a total of 33,000 yuan, an average of 3,000 yuan per corpse. The two “helpers” he found each involved in the theft of a corpse, only share the stolen money 500 yuan.
For the sake of not lucrative benefits, they repeatedly took the risk.
Among the corpse thieves, there are also some who are trying to match their family members, perhaps their deceased fathers and sons, or even their wives’ ex-husbands. A pair of brothers in Shanxi, before their father died, plowed out the bones of a corpse that had not been visited in the grave for years, put it in a coffin, found a plot of land and reburied it, intending to bury their father here as well after his death.
Regardless of the motive, these acts will be considered by the court as “theft and insulting the corpse”, which is punishable by up to 3 years of imprisonment, detention or control according to Article 302 of the Criminal Law. Detention or control. Most of those sentenced to more than 1.5 years are repeat offenders or have other criminal records. Families of the deceased, as buyers or sellers, are almost never prosecuted. Sometimes, buyers are not even required to return the body.
As for the stolen female bodies, they are more of a commodity in these cases, with some being discarded by buyers as “not like 20-somethings, too old to be wanted,” and some having been previously matched with a nuptial, and then sold by the body snatchers and used again for a nuptial.
Because of the weak relationship with the core case, the situation of their lives, almost no ink, occasionally a few sentences, so that their fate added to the sad color: a Shaanxi woman soon after marriage, because of domestic affairs in their own yard jumped to suicide, her body was sold by the body-snatching gang for 3,000 yuan. A Henan woman living with a concubine, drowned after drinking to the river when carrying water, two months after entering the ground, the concubine will dig up her body and sell it to others to match the nether marriage, making a profit of 8,000 yuan.
3.
/negotiation bargaining chips/
In addition to such horrific cases as murder and body theft, nether marriages are also mentioned in more everyday disputes. In about 50 judgments, the cost of a nether marriage became a bargaining chip, playing a more or less significant role in people fighting over compensation, inheritance, or benefits.
Such contests are widely found in all kinds of relationships, wife and in-laws, father and son, brother and brother, ex-husband and ex-wife, biological daughter and step-daughter …… Most of the time, the party who intends to take exclusive possession or more property will use the fact that he or she is about to or has given the deceased a yin marriage as one of the reasons to prove his or her dedication to the deceased and his or her closeness to the deceased, and ask the court to take care of it in the division, or to first offset the yin marriage expenses against the property to be divided, for his or her own benefit, and then divide it proportionally.
Sometimes the situation is reversed, and the marriage is treated as a disadvantage and becomes a tool for the party with less property. Before a Shaanxi woman died of cervical cancer, she made a will to leave her house to her brother, whose husband claimed that his brother had sold his wife’s body privately and demanded that the property be divided and all debts be borne by his brother, and threatened that “according to his attitude, he reserved the right to sue him for the illegal and criminal act of selling a corpse for a yin marriage. “The court later found that the matter of matching the nether marriage was not true.
Some old people made an agreement in the early years that after their own centuries, whoever matched the nether marriage for themselves or their son who died before them would get an extra share of the property, and the children unanimously approved and performed according to this. Many years later, those who did not pay for the marriage want to divide the property equally, and they ask the court to find the agreement invalid on the grounds that the marriage is not recognized by law.
In more than 70% of the disputes, people informed the court that the cost of the yin marriage was more than 100,000 yuan, and in some cases up to more than 200,000 yuan. This figure is a significant amount higher than the average price of buying and selling a corpse in a criminal case. Part of the reason for this is that in addition to the cost of buying a corpse, the accompanying jewelry and rituals also require some expense. For example, a pair of elderly people in Shaanxi province and their daughters-in-law argued over their son’s workplace death compensation, suggesting that it would cost about 220,000 yuan to match their son with a netherworld marriage, of which the “bride price” paid to the woman 48,000 yuan, and almost all the rest was used to buy earrings, bracelets, diamond rings and other dowry items.
In addition, some people will exaggerate the cost of the marriage in order to gain more advantage in the division of property. A man in Guangdong, in order to compete with his siblings for the inheritance, claimed that after giving the deceased elders a yin wedding, he had to send gifts to the yin wedding in-laws on behalf of the elders on every New Year’s Day and red and white events, 3 people at a time, 200 yuan each, “according to the average life expectancy of Chinese people 74.83 years “, at least 20 years to send, plus the previous costs of organizing the Yin wedding, the elders left nearly 200,000 yuan is not enough.
Some people’s faith in the legitimacy of the yin wedding custom was recorded in the verdict. Jia Lingling, a girl from Shaanxi, lost her father when she was 4 years old and then left the village with her mother. For more than a decade, she entrusted her third grandfather to receive a total of 80,000 yuan in various types of subsidies issued by the village, almost all of which were misappropriated. When the case was brought to court, the third grandfather claimed that the money was to be given to Jia Lingling’s deceased father for a nuptial, and the evidence presented to the court showed that he had said, “In The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang sacrificed the ghosts of the wronged, so who is responsible for the trouble caused by the wronged? This money can’t be given to Jia Lingling and the girls, for the safety of the whole village. “Another couple, from nowhere, issued a certificate showing that “the approximate price for a yin wedding in 2015 and 2016 was 182,000 yuan and 184,000 million” to justify their claim in 2019 that they needed nearly $200,000 to match their son with a yin marriage.
Most of the time, courts do not support claims for the cost of a yin marriage because it is “a feudal superstition and does not comply with public order and good customs and the law. Appeals were filed, arguing that the court did not take into account folk customs and found the funeral expenses too low, and even filed for a retrial after the verdict was upheld in the second instance, which was rejected.
The faces of the deceased in these cases remain blurred and are more or less materialized. A woman in Shandong was hospitalized for gas poisoning, and her husband, daughter, and son all died. After being discharged from the hospital, she found that her in-laws had taken the family’s bankbook, cash and compensation for themselves and sold her daughter’s body for $50,000. Instead of offering to recover her daughter’s body, she asked for a division of the $50,000 and other property. Later, she quickly reached an agreement with her in-laws that the 50,000 yuan from the sale of her daughter’s body would be used to match her son with a netherworld marriage. She then focused her energy on the fight over the property.
Her daughter, like Chen Tiantian, who was almost killed, was almost reduced to a tool for her family’s profit. In life and in death, it is not up to her to make her own arrangements.
(All characters in the article are pseudonyms)
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