The real walking dead

Last November, a young Chinese man was detained while traveling across Southern China's Yunnan Province for suspicious behavior, and it was behavior suspicious indeed: he was traveling with a dead body. The dead make for awkward traveling companions, but after some questioning, it was proved to the police that the dead man was, in fact, the young man's father. This traveler was trying to get his father's body back to their hometown in Hebei several provinces away. He had already walked more than 600 kilometers on his "corpse walking" endeavor before being stopped by the police.

Seemingly strange, the practice of walking corpses has long been a part of Chinese mourning. While the young lad in this tale is by no means a professional corpse walker, the profession and superstition still exists despite a severe decline in modern times. "Herding corpses" or 赶尸, is the tradition of transporting corpses back to their hometowns. Legend has it that, in the mountainous Xiangxi (湘西) of Hunan Province, one could sometimes catch a glimpse of the "dead men's march" where the corpse walker leads a line of dead bodies along narrow roads.

According to various corpse walking legends prevalent in Western Hunan, the technique was rumored to be Miao witchcraft; the Miao ethnic minority is famous for their supernatural gifts, called gushu (蛊术). Corpse walking is believed to be a form of gushu sorcery. It also invokes and borrows supernatural concepts from the I Ching.

Usually, the procession of corpses is led by two Taoist monks, one the master and the other his student. If a man were to die in another town, the dead person's relatives would travel there and ask a Taoist monk to take the body back to their hometown, an extremely important tradition in Chinese culture as a person's soul, body, home, and land are closely entwined. If the body cannot go home, the soul is lost forever in the world after death, suffering everlasting turmoil. Corpse walking was born out of filial piety, feng shui, and ancestor worship, and it contributes to the pervasiveness of such traditions.