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Midnight China — Dai Guihua: The Orphan Girl

They called her the Orphan Girl because the losses started early. Guihua Dai grew up in Langtang, a mountain town in Xinhua County, Hunan. Her mother died when she was small. Her father followed. She left school for factory work in the south, came home, married a man in glasses and cheap good suits, and tried to build the ordinary life the country kept promising: a rented flat, a car, two children, birthday cakes on WeChat.

Then the numbers stopped adding up. Online loans. A daughter’s epilepsy and a hospital hours away. Quarrels in a small kitchen. In September 2018 her husband disappeared. A white Kia was pulled from the Zijiang. The cabin was empty. Relatives talked. A policy arrived in the mail.

Twenty-two days later, Guihua wrote that she could not let him go alone.

This episode is about a woman who had already buried too many people, a plan she was never told, a town that needed someone to blame, and the hour between a letter and a pond. The facts were established quickly. What remains is harder.

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On a winter night in 1994, Zhang Zaiyu left her home in Jingshan County, Hubei, in a sweater and sweatpants. She was unwell. The marriage was strained. She told people later that she did not know where she was going — only that she had to keep walking.

Three months on, a body surfaced in a village pond. Relatives, working from height and hair and grief, said it was Zhang. There was no DNA test. She Xianglin, a twenty-eight-year-old patrolman and the father of their little girl, became the only suspect. After ten days and eleven nights of interrogation he signed four different confessions. One of them was enough. A court sentenced him to death. A higher court sent the case back. In 1998 he was given fifteen years.

His mother walked the countryside looking for a living woman, and died after months in detention. Villagers who said they had seen Zhang were punished for saying so.

On 28 March 2005, Zhang Zaiyu came home from Shandong with a new husband and a son. She had only wanted to see her daughter. She Xianglin walked out of Shayang Prison four days later.

This episode of Midnight China follows the years between those two walks: the confession built in a lit room, the people who tried to tell the truth, and the unnamed woman the file never bothered to know.

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After the Snow: The Diao Aiqing Case

In January 1996, after a heavy snow in Nanjing, a sanitation worker on Huaqiao Road picked up a bag that looked like discarded food. It was the first of several packages found around Nanjing University’s Gulou campus. The remains belonged to Aiqing Diao, a nineteen-year-old student from a farming family in Jiangyan, Jiangsu. She had been on campus a little more than three months.

This episode of Midnight China tells her story before the case file: the exams, the adult-education seat at Nanjing University, South Garden Dormitory Building 4, a shared fine over a cooker, and an ordinary winter afternoon after which she did not come back. It then follows what the official record can still support — the 1·19 investigation, the three-month task force that never found the first scene, and a family that was never given a grave.

Thirty years later, no one has been charged. The Ministry of Public Security has said the case remains open. Where the public record splits — the date she left campus, her year of birth, what was and was not recovered — we say so, instead of sanding it into a neater mystery.

A quiet account of an unsolved death, and of the people who have had to live beside it.

Also known as the Nanjing University dismemberment case, the Nanjing 1·19 case, or 南大碎尸案 / 南京“1·19”碎尸案.

Content note: This episode discusses homicide and the discovery of human remains. It does not dwell on graphic method.