Some historical writings mention that during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), alchemists prepared elixirs for emperors with children's urine because they believed it provided eternal life. Other ancient texts describe the use of urine to ward off demons that entered homes to take away young children.
Ching's grandmother was convinced that with her grandson's urine, she would prevent these demons from kidnapping him, as she believed had happened to other missing children in Guizhou villages in the southwest of China. It was the early 1990s.
One morning in late 1993, when the grandmother went to wake up Ching, her grandson was not there. The child's parents, who were working in another province, blamed the grandmother for the disappearance, accusing her of being more focused on leaving pots of urine at the door than watching the child. The grandmother passed away years later convinced that an evil entity had taken her grandson. But in reality, it was a much more earthly being.
A woman named Yu Huaying spent from 1993 to 2003 kidnapping children from very poor areas in southwest China and selling them to wealthy families in other provinces. One of the first children she kidnapped was Ching, who years later was able to discover his origins and reunite with his biological parents thanks to the extensive DNA database that the Chinese police use to solve the hundreds of thousands of open cases of stolen children.
Yu, the kidnapper, was finally arrested in 2022 and, a year later, a court sentenced her to death for trafficking 11 children. Yu's first victim (61 years old) was her own son, whom she sold for 5,000 yuan, which is equivalent to 650 euros. Her arrest was made possible thanks to the report of another victim, Yang Niuhua, sold to a family in Hebei province in 1995 for 2,500 yuan (320 euros).
A few days ago, a court in Guizhou retried Yu because investigators had discovered that, with the help of a deceased accomplice, the woman had actually kidnapped and sold a total of 17 children. And these are just the resolved cases. There could be many more.
Ching, the child abducted at the age of two, now lives in Shanghai. In conversations with this newspaper, he assures that his adoptive mother confessed to him a decade ago the truth, that he was a stolen baby. He joined the DNA program and two years ago he was able to reunite with his biological parents. They told him the story of how his grandmother left pots of urine at the door of their house to ward off evil spirits.