--He lived to 103, and Ruigong followed through on his end of the deal. He paid the equivalent of $160 for an adult dancer to perform a ten minute striptease in front of his father’s coffin.
In farming villages across rural China and Taiwan, stripper funerals have become commonplace. Local folks believe that the number of mourners who gather for a funeral indicates the worthiness of the deceased. Also, the more people who come to the funeral, the more luck will befall the surviving family and offspring. Strippers are a surefire way to draw mourners. In some towns in Jiangsu, a province in eastern China, the events have become nightly spectacles, drawing the entire town out. Sometimes rival funerals occur, and strippers compete to see who can attract the best crowd. “Some strippers even take off the trousers of male viewers and persuade them to join in the dancing, while others bathe in public or perform Nood with snakes,” reports one Chinese newspaper.
Stripper funerals have become so popular that they have caught the eye of the overbearing communist government, which a few years ago detained five people for running “striptease send-off funerals”. The arrests also took place in Jiangsu province. Local officials have ordered a halt to the performances, calling them “obscene” and are requiring funeral plans to be submitted to the state in advance for approval. Officials have also set up a hotline, asking villagers to call in and report funeral misdeeds.
---According to an AFP report released Tuesday, pole dances and stripteases are commonly performed at religious festivals in some areas in Taiwan in order to "appease the wandering spirits."
In some cases, women dressed in tiny miniskirts and revealing brassieres shimmy and shake on stage in front an audience of men, women and children.
However, though this may seem bizarre to some, it is neither a new nor terribly unorthodox practice -- at least as far as Taiwan goes.
In 2011, anthropologist Marc L. Moskowitz featured this practice in a documentary entitled "Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan."
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