Du Hong, a popular writer of children's literature from Chongqing, has had her remains frozen after her death in May in the hope of one day being brought back to life.

This is the first known case of a Chinese citizen using cryonics, the controversial practice of preserving a human body at extremely low temperatures. The process involves storing bodies in aluminium containers in super-cold (minus 196 degrees Celsius) liquid nitrogen.

Du Hong hoped that the technology of the future might be able to reanimate her brain. She paid over $120,000 to freeze it. Her brain was sent from China to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Traditional Chinese culture rules that the body must be intact to prepare it for the afterlife. But Hong organized all of this in preparation for her death caused by pancreatic cancer on May 30, wishing to be subject to the very sci-fi experiments she conjured up in her writing.