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.