SKIRMISHER

A farmer in Chenjiayuan, China, is seen here feeling groovy and cool as he smokes what’s probably pot. I don’t know what he’s got to do with this story.

Honest people in rural China still care a lot about “living” a good afterlife that parents of dead bachelors scour the countryside for newly dead girls. When the right dead girl is found, she’s then buried in the same grave with the right dead bachelor.

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

I think I should stop here and not dare tell the story of how they do the honeymoon.

via NYTIMES

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