downstream business activities

Interesting piece on a family in western China whose main source of income is as freelance corpse extractors from the Yellow River, recovering bodies and – basically – selling them back to their relatives. They’re not the only people who follow that trade, but the odd thing is here that it appears to be a full time job. This is in Gansu, one of China’s most sparsely populated provinces, and on the upper reaches of the river as well. The other slightly remarkable thing is the apparent official indifference to the Li family business: 

Usually, unidentifiable bodies are tied by ropes in the water with one end of the rope attached to the shore. If nobody comes to claim the body after a few days, Li and his family members have no choice but to return the body to the river. 

"Many people come here to look for bodies," Li Heshan said in the documentary. "Most of them are grateful. We do not have the right to burn or bury bodies, but I do wish there was a place that those leftover bodies belonged to."

Comments

[ejh]

It's quite similar to what the chap did in Our Mutual Friend, though if I recall, he was basically robbing the bodies of anything they had on them, rather than retrieving them for relatives. As with your example, what strikes one is that there must have been a lot of bodies floating down the river for the trade to pay its way.

[Cardiff jobs]

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[Chris Williams]

There was a German copper on Sylt (where the North Sea gyre deposits victims of drowning in, inter alia, the English east coast) who did/does this as a sideline for nothing. A few years ago he was able to close a case that I knew about, thus ending a lot of grief and uncertainty on the part of the victim's relatives. Top bloke.

[dsquared]

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[ajay]

Chris: I think I see a gloomy North European detective novel waiting to happen there...