Comicwell

What is a Chinese ghost marriage?

A Chinese ghost marriage (冥婚, minghun, “underworld marriage”) is a wedding in which at least one partner is dead. Families arrange one so that a son or daughter who died unmarried gains a spouse, a proper place in a family line and someone to make offerings, and so that the restless spirit stops troubling the living.

Updated November 12, 2026

Why do Chinese families arrange ghost marriages?

Because in traditional Chinese belief a person who dies unmarried has no secure place among the ancestors, and an uncared-for spirit can turn into a dangerous ghost.

Chinese ancestor worship runs through the family line. A man’s spirit tablet stands on his family altar and his descendants feed him with offerings. A daughter was expected to marry into another family and be worshipped there, so a girl who died young belonged nowhere. The anthropologist David K. Jordan, who studied a village in southwestern Taiwan in the 1960s, quotes a Taiwanese writer: having a dead, unmarried daughter was “a shameful business,” and her tablet was hidden in a secluded corner of the house, such as the room where she had slept. A spirit marriage moved that tablet to a husband’s altar, where it would receive offerings like any wife’s.

A son who died single had the opposite problem: no wife, and so no descendants to care for him. Old texts already warn that a ghost with no one to make offerings is the kind that does harm (see Chinese ghost stories and hungry ghosts). Families in Jordan’s village usually turned to a spirit marriage only after illness or bad luck, when a medium said the cause was a lonely ghost who wanted a husband.

How old is the custom of ghost marriage?

At least two thousand years old: an early text forbids it, and the historical record shows the warlord Cao Cao arranging one in 208.

  • The Rites of Zhou. This classic on government, traditionally attributed to the Zhou dynasty, lists the duties of the official matchmaker. One of them is to “forbid moving graves to bury people together and marrying off those who died young” (禁遷葬者與嫁殤者). A ban only makes sense if people were doing it.
  • Cao Cao’s son. The Records of the Three Kingdoms (三國志) says that Cao Chong, Cao Cao’s gifted son, fell ill and died in 208 at the age of thirteen. Cao Cao grieved bitterly. He arranged a marriage between Cao Chong and a dead daughter of the Zhen family and had the two buried together.

How does a ghost marriage work?

There are two main forms: two dead people married to each other, or a dead person married to a living one.

The two forms of Chinese ghost marriage
Dead to deadDead to living
Who marriesTwo people who both died unmarriedA dead person, most often a girl, and a living spouse
What happensA wedding-like ceremony, then the bride’s remains are reburied in the groom’s graveAn ordinary-looking wedding in which the bride is represented by her spirit tablet, or by a dressed figure
ExampleCao Chong and the Zhen daughter, 208The spirit brides Jordan recorded in 1960s Taiwan
What it securesBoth spirits gain a spouse and a shared graveThe dead bride gains a place on her husband’s family altar

The red envelope on the road

In the traditional Taiwanese form Jordan describes, the dead girl appears to her family in a dream and asks to be married. The family leaves bait in the road, usually a red envelope of the kind used for gifts of money, and waits nearby. When a young man picks it up, they step out and tell him he is the chosen bridegroom. Refusing risks the ghost’s anger, and a generous dowry may help him agree. His only duty afterward is to keep her tablet on his family altar and make offerings to it. In Jordan’s village, by the 1960s, the groom was almost always the husband of the dead girl’s married sister.

Do ghost marriages still happen in China?

Occasionally, in poor rural areas of northern China, and the demand for brides has led to crimes.

In October 2015 police in Ruicheng county, Shanxi province, detained three people suspected of trying to steal a young woman’s body from a village tomb, the Associated Press reported, citing Xinhua. The main suspect, 72, had agreed to sell it for 25,000 yuan to the family of a man who died single, and villagers caught the three in the act. The report describes the practice as a centuries-old custom that pairs single people in marriage in the afterlife, in which the body is reburied in the partner’s tomb during a wedding-like ceremony with gongs and drums. A professor at Nanjing Normal University, Xu Keqian, told the agency that it happens occasionally in poor rural areas where people believe in an afterlife.

Ghost brides in Chinese fiction

Love between the living and the dead is one of the oldest themes in Chinese storytelling, and ghost marriage gives it a ritual form.

Pu Songling’s 17th-century Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is full of ghost women who fall in love with scholars; see our guide to Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. A modern novel puts the custom at its center: Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride (2013), set in Malaya in 1893, follows Li Lan, a young woman whose family is asked to marry her to the dead son of the wealthy Lim family.

Questions about Chinese ghost marriage

What does minghun mean?
Minghun (冥婚) means underworld marriage or marriage in the dark realm. It is the Chinese name for a ghost marriage, a wedding in which one or both partners are dead.
What is a ghost bride?
A ghost bride is a woman married after her death, either to a dead man so that the two can share a grave, or to a living man who keeps her spirit tablet on his family altar. The term is also used for a living woman married to a dead man, as in Yangsze Choo's novel The Ghost Bride.
Why should you not pick up a red envelope in Taiwan?
Because of an old spirit marriage custom. A family looking for a husband for a dead daughter would leave a red envelope in the road, and the young man who picked it up was told he was the chosen groom. The anthropologist David K. Jordan recorded the custom in Taiwan in the 1960s.
Did Cao Cao arrange a ghost marriage?
Yes. According to the Records of the Three Kingdoms, when his son Cao Chong died in 208 at the age of thirteen, Cao Cao arranged a marriage between him and a dead daughter of the Zhen family and had them buried together.
Do ghost marriages still happen?
Rarely, mostly in poor rural areas of northern China. Demand for dead brides has led to crimes: in 2015 police in Shanxi province detained three people for stealing a young woman's body from a tomb to sell for a ghost wedding.

Read it as a story

Comicwell’s The Unquiet City also ties a living man to a ghost. Contractor Callum Rourke quietly takes the dead out of San Francisco’s old buildings. Then a job binds him to Yip Sau-lin, a ghost who died in the 1870s, and neither can stray far from the other. The first 20 comic chapters are free. The novel it is adapted from is The Dead Must Be Disclosed, and the first 10 novel chapters are free.

More legends: Chinese ghost stories and hungry ghosts, the Legend of the White Snake and who was Judge Bao? All guides: Chinese legends explained.

Sources