Man Is Imprisoned In China For Opening Coffins And Loving Skulls At An Ancient Burial Site

In China, a man was sentenced to a nine-month suspended prison term after visiting an old burial site and defiling three coffins in an effort to make money through live-streaming. According to the South China Morning Post, locals apprehended the 21-year-old male, surnamed Chen, trespassing on the historic Guoli underground burial site in March of last year.
According to the story, Chen unsealed three coffins with the assistance of two companions and live-streamed a video of himself taking the bones from one of the coffins. Not only that, but he was also photographed caressing corpses.

Notably, the location in question goes back to the Ming era and includes a “coffin cave,” a traditional form of burial used by the Miao ethnic group in Guizhou. The Guoli cave-style burial was designated as a regional cultural relic preservation site in 2015.

Longli County People’s Procuratorate charged him on February 16 after the footage surfaced on the video site Anmo. The police were initially reluctant to pursue charges, but court officials persisted on pursuing the individual accountable in order to help safeguard cultural artefacts.

“Failure to harshly punish such behaviour will damage regular social order and the preservation of local cultural artefacts,” the police said. The man subsequently apologised to the relatives of those buried at the spot and was sentenced to a suspended prison term.

Meanwhile, the event sparked widespread outrage on Chinese social media sites, with users shocked by the man’s actions.

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“Even cemetery thieves know opening graves is immoral, and money-grubbing live-streamers don’t have a bottom line,” one individual remarked, according to SCMP.

A drug user dug up cemeteries to extract jewellery in a comparable occurrence in the United Kingdom. According to the BBC, Wayne Joselyn, a 43-year-old drug addict and chronic felon, dug up Kell and Maud Goodwin’s tombs because he believed they contained valuable jewellery.