Copper Bell Ferry: Secret Records of the Yangtze River's Corpse Bearers

At Copper Bell Ferry in the middle reaches of the Yangtze, the river wind has carried the stench of corpses for decades. Chen Chungen is the last corpse retriever here. He clings to the “Three Rules of Retrieval” passed down by his father: Don’t retrieve a body unless the copper bell rings. Don’t rest beneath the hanging-coffin cliff. Never touch a female corpse dressed in red.

But the arrival of Jia Zhuangwen, a reporter from the city, shatters those rules. Carrying a photo of his sister, he insists Chen Chungen go into the river and retrieve a corpse dressed in red. The body is one of the thirty people who disappeared in the river during the “River Sacrifice” case ten years ago. Chen Chungen means to refuse, but that very night he encounters evil: the soul-calming copper bell rings without a breeze, river weeds wrap around his doorframe, and even his dead father appears in a dream, telling him, “Retrieve the body. Go to the hanging-coffin cliff and find the stele.”

With no other choice, he shoulders a body-retrieval rope, takes the copper bell, and goes downriver with Jia Zhuangwen. They retrieve not only the red-clad corpse, whose fingernails are embedded with copper nails, but also a dense mass of skeletons from the riverbed. At the hanging-coffin cliff, they find a face in an ancient coffin identical to those of the victims in the river-sacrifice case. More terrifying still, the closer they get to the truth, the clearer the echoes in the Yangtze become. They aren’t the sound of the wind, but the wails of thirty dead souls, the lingering echo of an unfinished river-sacrifice ritual, and the curse that has haunted Copper Bell Ferry for ten years.