Central China used to have a widely used ritual called “Beating The Hanba” to ward off droughts, involving the desecration of corpses that villagers believed were responsible for the calamitous weather – an elderly villager recounted the following story in relation to this bizarre tradition

What would you do if your livestock died, your crops withered, and your neighbors whispered that a hungry ghost was to blame? In the heart of China, communities once performed a desperate, brutal ritual known as "beating the Hanba" – exhuming and desecrating a corpse believed to be the drought spirit. This is the story of one village that did just that… and discovered they had made a catastrophic error that might bring about an even greater calamity.