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China’s traditions of ancestor worship mean that many families prefer to bury their deceased loved ones, keeping them intact rather than reduced to ash and bone in a crematorium. But this runs up against a newer reality. Despite the country’s continental size, China is starved of arable land and communities are discouraged to take up more space for cemeteries. In 2012, the provincial government in the central province of Henan even went so far as to raze hundreds of thousands of tombs to clear space for agricultural land, much to the ire of locals.

Body-snatching is, therefore, a lucrative, illicit business, involving bribe-taking local officials who look the other way, specialists capable of dressing up cadavers, and middlemen willing to connect desperate families to organized rings of grave-robbers and body-snatchers.

The practice of burying “ghost brides” also remains very much in the headlines. The old ritual involves burying a deceased young female alongside a dead bachelor, so the male will not be without a companion in the afterlife.

Last week, Chinese authorities arrested 11 people in eastern Shandong province for exhuming the grave of a woman and selling the body to a middleman for about $3,000. Four men in March 2013 were sentenced to two years in jail after allegedly making $40,000 from selling 10 stolen corpses. In 2006, one man in northern Hebei province even killed six women to sell them as ghost brides.

Beginning with the rule of Communist leader Mao Zedong, corpse-stealing has been a criminal act in China, but Beijing has been unable to fully stamp out the custom in rural areas. In a chilling episode in May, a number of elderly residents in southeastern Anhui province opted to commit suicide before local restrictions regarding coffin burials came into full effect.