Digging up the dead: the Thai ceremony to pamper neglected human remains – helping their spirits to ‘move on’
- Thai volunteers exhume the bones of the nameless dead, who have no one else to care for them, at a graveyard in the beach town of Pattaya
- They perform a ceremony on the remains to aid the deceased in their spiritual rebirths
Thanakorn Theerakarunwong is a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, and is handy with suction cups, ear candles and acupuncture needles. The Thai-Chinese man is wielding a different tool, though, when we meet: a forked wooden rod used in spirit writing.
Solemn and bespectacled, Thanakorn, 32, is a tongji, or spirit medium, and is ostensibly relaying messages from the Eight Immortals, from Chinese mythology, through the rod in his hand. The Chinese divinities are about to reveal which graves will need prying open in a small graveyard outside Pattaya, a seaside town in eastern Thailand.
Waiting expectantly for the results on this April morning – when Chinese people elsewhere observe the ancestor festival known as Ching Ming – are hundreds of locals dressed in funereal white. They’re queuing up at the nondescript graveyard, which is located next to a well-kept Chinese cemetery with undulating grassy knolls fronted by richly decorated tombstones.
Many of the waiting men and women are wearing surgical masks and latex gloves. That’s because they are here to exhume and clean human remains that lie in regimented rows of small identical graves with cinderblock sides and earthen bottoms. Apart for hand-painted numbers on them, nothing sets the graves apart and nothing indicates whose remains they contain.
“We don’t know who they are,” says Sinchai Wattanasatsaton, a businessman who is vice-president of a local Thai-Chinese Buddhist charity that runs humanitarian initiatives and organised today’s grave-exhuming event. “They’ve been neglected since the day they died.”
The hundreds of graves here are the temporary resting places of people who died in recent years without any known next of kin in Pattaya and elsewhere around Chonburi province. They were undocumented foreign migrant workers, unidentified murder and accident victims, homeless derelicts and elderly people shunned by relatives.