Documenting mass grave relocation in China

Stanford historian Tom Mullaney's interactive website, The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China , shows the locations of thousands of gravesites that have been relocated in China over the past two decades. In what is considered to be the largest grave relocation in human history so far, more than 10 million corpses have been exhumed in China over the past two decades to make way for new development projects. Now, a new digital collaboration led by Stanford historian Tom Mullaney , titled The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China , has documented the location of the affected gravesites throughout the country and explored what's driving this journey of the dead. The project, which was published online this spring, consists of an interactive website that includes a map of China pinpointing the locations of thousands of gravesites that Mullaney and his collaborators compiled. The dataset is the most comprehensive, publicly available document on grave relocations that occurred in China over the past two decades, Mullaney said. The team's dataset also includes grave relocations that happened between 1644 and 1949. The website also includes several essays written by Mullaney and other researchers that analyze the history of grave relocation and burial practices in China.