Posted by Ghost marriage, minghun in Chinese, is an ancient Chinese tradition in which one or both spouses are dead. It gives a family and ancestor worship to those who die unmarried, respects the order of marriage between siblings and appeases the spirits. It is still practised in some areas and has fuelled a black market for female corpses.
Customs and traditions for a wedding can be very different depending on the country where you are located.
This particular celebration, however, is truly unique.
It is found mostly in China and is also used in modern times.
The ghost marriage
In China there is a tradition that celebrates a marriage after one or both spouses have died.
They are the so-called ghost marriages: real ceremonies between a living person and a dead one, or between two dead people. In Chinese they are called minghun, “spirit marriage”, and the practice dates back at least to the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), when they were mostly held by wealthy families. Behind it lies the philosophy of yin and yang, which must unite to achieve harmony, and the idea that the spirit of someone who dies unmarried feels lonely in the afterlife.
They are celebrated like any other marriage, but the missing partner is replaced by a white rooster, for example when a bride decides to marry her dead fiancé anyway, or by figures made of bamboo, coloured paper or cloth dressed in traditional wedding clothes, which are burned at the end.
Why are the ghost marriages celebrated?
Honor and shame
To understand this practice we must consider the culture of those who practice it.
A married woman becomes part of her husband’s family and when she dies it is her husband’s family that takes care of her funeral and her altar.
The altar is very important and serves to honor the memory of the deceased. It’s very common in Asia and every family has one.
If a woman dies unmarried, her family could not, by tradition, place her tablet on the home altar. At most they could keep a temporary paper one in a corner near the door. So they would not be able to honour her death.
Also an unmarried daughter is a disgrace to the family and if a daughter does not get married she can no longer live with her family.
Social rules
Another reason why a dead person should marry is that
a younger brother cannot marry before the elder brother is married. Even if he is dead.
It’s therefore very common that the wedding of a dead firstborn takes place just before that of the second son.
Superstition
It is also believed that an unmarried man, once dead, claims a wife from the afterlife.
This demand is usually materialized in diseases plaguing his family members.
How are the ghost partners’ chosen?
There are people, sometimes priests, who act as matchmakers and bring together families who need a ghost marriage, based on their horoscope.
Other families think it is the deceased who chooses their partners by giving specific signals in order to make it clear. Some leave a red envelope with gifts in the street, convinced that the future bride or groom will reveal themselves this way.
Ghost weddings in modern days
Ghost marriages are still practised in some parts of China, but they are not as common as they once were.
This leads to a shortage of ghost partners, so incidents of desecration of graves have been recorded.
Families who need a ghost marriage pay people to steal the corpse of a woman or a man, as needed, in order to celebrate the ghost marriage.
Between 2017 and 2019 a real black market for female corpses emerged in the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi and Shaanxi, with bodies sold for hundreds of thousands of yuan, and even the graves of elderly married women were targeted. In 2019 some cemeteries in Henan installed CCTV cameras and concrete coffins. Chinese law does not explicitly ban ghost marriages, but it does deal with the crimes they lead to: the theft of corpses and, in the worst cases, the murder of women to sell their bodies.
This custom has been described in some books and was mentioned in some TV series such as “Bones” and “Numb3rs”
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