Woman's body preserved after 16 years

The body of a woman who died 16 years ago has been almost perfectly preserved in her Sichuan province home, West China Metropolitan News reported on Thursday.

Tang Deqing was a resident of Laoyin village in the city of Nanchong in the province. She died at home when she was 25 years old in 1998.

A forensic analysis showed Tang's cause of death was suicide by pesticide poisoning.

Her family, suspicious of the analysis, kept Tang's body in the room where she died in hopes that the true cause of her death would one day be revealed.

"I know my daughter. She would never have committed suicide," said Tang's father.

Having moved to another house, her family placed Tang's body in a pine coffin covered by a thin film of plastic.

After years of neglect, objects in the room have mostly decayed. But Tang's body hasn't decomposed.

Her father said he comes to visit his daughter several times each year.

"Her body has always been like this. Not much has changed," he said, adding that he and Tang's other family members didn't take any measures to preserve the body.

Li Liangwen, a human anatomy professor at Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said the pesticide Tang ingested might have killed the bacteria inside her digestive tract, causing the same preserving effect as formaldehyde on bodies.

If the weather was cool on the day she died, any water on her body's surface would have evaporated rapidly, protecting the body tissue from becoming infected.

During the autopsy, some of Tang's organs were removed which reduced the level of bacteria in her body and might have prevented the body from rotting.