This remarkable custom is obviously such a convenient means of avoiding the trouble and expense of conveying dead bodies from distant places, that its comparative rarity may well be a matter of some surprise. Certainly, if the practice were to come into common use it would indirectly give a great impulse to emigration: for which reason it may perhaps be hoped by some Western peoples that it will for ever remain unfashionable. The custom is, however, an exceedingly old one, and was practised even at the Imperial Court nearly nineteen centuries ago.[224] There seems to have always been a strong prejudice against it, partly because it was a foolish superstition and partly because it would tempt the people to cease troubling themselves about the burial of their parents or bringing home their bodies from a distance, and would thus tend to the degradation or weakening of the ideals of filial piety. Hence we find that the practice of burying souls without the bodies was in 318 A.D. condemned by Imperial Decree as heretical;[225] yet this condemnation by no means brought about its discontinuance, and the present legal position is that the "violation of a grave in which an evoked soul is interred shall be punished just as severely as the violation of a grave occupied by a corpse,"[226] that is to say the offender may be sentenced to death. In his interesting section on this strange custom Dr. De Groot remarks that as it has been "of common prevalence for at least eighteen centuries" its occurrence even nowadays can hardly be doubted. It certainly exists at Weihaiwei, though it is not in very common use. One reason for practising it in this little corner of China is based on the very strong belief that husband and wife should always be buried in the same grave. If the husband dies while he is abroad and the body is lost or cannot be brought home, nothing is necessarily done until his widow (who has remained at home) dies also. When she is buried, her husband's soul is ceremonially summoned to take up its residence in a paper scroll bearing the _pa ko tzŭ_ ("eight characters" naming the year, month, day and hour of birth), and this, with or without a straw effigy, is formally placed in the grave by the widow's side.