On 4 January, three men in the western Chinese province of Shaanxi were arrested for killing two young women to sell their corpses as “ghost brides” for dead single men, a custom known as minghun dating back to before the Han dynasty.

In the yellow-earth highlands of western China, there is a belief that young men and women who die unmarried should go to their graves accompanied by a recently deceased partner to be their spouse in the afterlife. It is thought that the unmarried dead will often haunt the living in dreams and can ruin the prosperity of future generations.

Yang Donghai, 35-year-old peasant, confessed to killing a woman bought from a poor family for 12,000 yuan (£785) last year. Yang said he was “tricked” into buying the girl, who was mentally handicapped and unable to care for herself. Realising she was not marriage material for himself, Yang hatched a plan with Liu Shengha to recover his losses. They made contact with “Old Li”, Li Longsheng, an undertaker in Xixian county known for trading dead women for “ghost weddings”. Yang and Liu poisoned and then strangled the girl, selling the corpse to Li for 16,000 yuan. Emboldened by their success, Yang and Liu, with help from Hui Haibao, lured a prostitute to an aband­oned courtyard in the city of Yan’an where they strangled her and sold her to Li on 3 December for 8,000 yuan. “It’s a good thing we broke the case when we did, otherwise who knows how many women would have been murdered? These guys found a get-rich-quick scheme,” said the chief of police in Yangchuan county.