Google Maps helps Chinese man find home 23 years after abduction
Google Maps has helped a Chinese man to locate his family, 23 years after he was abducted while walking to school.
By Tom Phillips, Shanghai 1:16PM BST 17 May 2013
Luo Gang was five when he was snatched near his school in the southwestern province of Sichuan and taken hundreds of miles east to Fujian province.
There, in the city of Sanming, Mr Luo was raised by adoptive parents. But, according to a report in Fujian's Strait News, he longed to find his biological parents.
"Everyday before I went to bed, I forced myself to relive the life spent in my old home," he told the newspaper.
In a country with over 1.3 billion inhabitants, the man's chances of ever tracking down his family appeared slim. All he could remember of his hometown was that it had two bridges.
But that started to change when Mr Luo posted details of his story on a Chinese website that helps reunite families with missing children. One of the website's contributors replied with information about a Sichuan family who had lost their son 23 years ago.
Using Google Maps, Mr Luo managed to pinpoint the two bridges he had remembered from his childhood which were located in a village in Sichuan's Linshui county.
"That is my home," he reportedly shouted. A photographer captured the highly emotional reunion between Mr Luo and his parents, Huang Qingyong and Dai Jianfang who had subsequently adopted a daughter.
The man's original name, it emerged, had been Huang Jun. "I felt heartbroken. I couldn't eat or sleep and I cried every day thinking my son was missing and didn't have enough food or clothes out there," his mother, Mrs Dai, recalled of the boy's disappearance.
Cases of child abduction and trafficking are shockingly common in China, with tens of thousands of children going missing each year according to reports in the domestic media.
In March, the China Daily reported that there were around one million families who had lost children in China. Some 76,000 families lost a child each year, the newspaper claimed.
Many of the victims are young boys who are then sold to families who are in search of a son.
