The site in question dates back to the Ming dynasty
A man in China has been punished with a nine-month suspended jail term after he visited an ancient burial site and defiled three coffins in an attempt to make money from live-streaming. According to a report by South China Morning Post, villagers caught the 21-year-old man, surnamed Chen, trespassing the ancient Guoli cave burial site in March last year.
As per the report, Chen opened up three coffins with the help of his two friends and live-streamed a video of himself that showed him removing the bones from one of the coffins. Not only that but he was also seen kissing skulls.
Notably, the site in question dates back to the Ming dynasty and features a traditional form of burial used by the Miao ethnic group in Guizhou known as a ''coffin cave''. In 2015, the Guoli cave-style burial was listed as a provincial cultural relic protection site.
After the video surfaced on a video platform called Anmo, Longli County People's Procuratorate pressed charges against him on February 16. Initially, the police were not keen on pressing charges but judicial officials insisted on prosecuting the man responsible to help protect cultural relics.
''Not severely cracking down on such behaviour will harm the normal social order and the protection of local cultural relics,'' the police said. The man then apologised to the descendants of the people buried at the site and was later slapped with a suspended jail term.
Meanwhile, the incident garnered a lot of criticism on social media websites in China, who were left appalled by the man's actions.
“Even grave robbers know it is immoral to open coffins, and money-grubbing live-streamers don't have a bottom line,” one person commented, as per SCMP.
In a similar incident in the UK, a drug addict dug up graves to extract jewellery. According to the BBC, Wayne Joselyn, a 43-year-old drug addict and habitual criminal, dug up Kell and Maud Goodwin's graves because he thought they held priceless jewellery.