HONG KONG — A man in north-western Shaanxi province who married a disabled woman half his age so that they could eventually be buried together in an ancient custom has been detained by police in connection with her death.
Zhu Liantang, 69, admitted to setting his house on fire on Chinese New Year’s Eve and burning his wife Ms Li Chun, 35, to death, according to a Yulin city police report on the province’s official website.
He refused to reveal his motive and was still under investigation, police told Shanghai-based website Thepaper.cn on Feb 18. Zhu has not been charged.
The couple were married in 2013 in a plan to observe a centuries-old “posthumous marriage” burial rite, Ms Zhu Hongyun, 46, Zhu’s daughter from an earlier marriage, told Thepaper.cn.
According to Shaanxi rural custom, a deceased person must be buried with bones of a partner to rest in peace. While the wealthy can afford to spend as much as 100,000 yuan (S$20,000) to acquire the body or bones of an unknown person for burial with a deceased relative, the poor are typically interred with paper dolls, a villager was quoted as saying.
Zhu’s daughter said her parents divorced many years ago, and her father raised her on his own.
She considered buying bones to be buried with her father but she was worried about the legality of doing so, according to the report.
Instead, she arranged for Zhu to marry Ms Li — whose father wanted someone to look after his mentally and physically disabled daughter. A bride price of 2,400 yuan was paid to Ms Li’s family.
The bride had polio and could not walk or talk. Her IQ was an estimated at between 25 and 39, which is classified as a severe mental disability, Thepaper.cn reported. Zhu’s daughter and grandson expected to take care of Ms Li until she died and bury her with the old man if he died first.
Members of the public criticised the burial custom, while others questioned the legality of marrying off a disabled person under such circumstances.
“How could the woman’s family let its 30-year-old marry a 65-year-old man? This is selling a corpse,” one Weibo user said. “Human trafficking is human trafficking. How does a paralysed and intellectually disabled woman (consent to getting) married?”
According to law, marriages involving people with serious intellectual disabilities are not allowed, China Women’s News reported.
Posthumous marriage has been a custom in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Henan and Guangdong for more than a thousand years.
In 2013, Wang Hairong was sentenced to death for killing a pregnant woman in Shaanxi province in 2009 and selling her remains to the family of a deceased man for 22,000 yuan, Legal Daily reported.
There were 34 incidences of posthumous marriage between 2009 and 2015, according to China Judgements Online, a database of more than 63 million court rulings. The records involved 23 criminal cases and 44 corpses across eight provinces and transactions priced between 3,000 yuan and about 10,000 yuan. SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
https://www.todayonline.com/world/c...man-35-burial-ritual-then-he-burned-her-death
