I was recently looking at some Taiwanese news reports and I ran across this interesting and disturbing story. A British citizen of Taiwanese descent was arrested in Bangkok with the corpses of six children between 2-7 months old. Some corpses were covered in gold leaf. According to the article, "In Thai black-magic rituals, also observed in some Chinese communities, preserved fetuses are believed to bring good fortune to the owner and are often kept in shrines inside homes or businesses." It seems that smugglers make money by either smuggling gold in the dead infant bodies or preserving the corpses and selling them "at a very high price to people who believe that possessing them will bring them good fortune." Most of the infant corpses are stillbirths from abortions. I'm wondering if this practice is a black-market effect of the one-child policy or if it has been around much longer.
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