A bizarre and macabre case of "double-death" marriage has stunned investigators in Hebei Province.
Over Spring Festival of this year, a family surnamed Wu sold their daughter's dead body for 35,000 yuan ($5,557) to a man surnamed Liu, so that Liu could perform a "yin marriage" - a marriage between two dead bodies - between the Wu's daughter and Liu's younger brother.
After the pro-forma wedding, the two deceased lovebirds were buried in a single tomb.
This strange episode then took an even more odd turn, when it was discovered on February 1 that the tomb had been destroyed and Wu's body was missing. Enraged, Liu immediately went to police to report the disappearance of his missing "sister-in-law".
A few weeks later, police tracked down five men, accusing them of exhuming and stealing the body of the girl - all to marry her off yet again, for a tidy 30,000-yuan sum, to another family, surnamed Li, who were also in search of a corpse for one of their deceased male family members.
The case is still under investigation.
chinanews.com