Sun Wei was just 4-years-old when in 1995 he was kidnapped as he walked home from kindergarten in Liangshan Yi, Sichuan Province.
He was given sweets by a stranger and led into a van.
His father Sun Zhenghua, who was 25 at the time, reported the abduction to police.
But as he and his wife didn’t have a single picture of their son to issue, it made it almost impossible for the incident to be processed.
In the meantime, Sun Wei was taken to the city of Jieyang, in Guangdong Province, and sold to a couple who already had a seven-year-old daughter.
Sun Wei recalled: “I was taken to a family and given a new name, Xiaochuan, and my birthday was changed to November 6, 1993.
"When I first arrived at my foster parents, I couldn’t understand a word of the local dialect,” he added.
Sun Wei said he was always acutely aware that he had been kidnapped.
“All the neighbours knew. My foster parents never mentioned it, but they never knew that I knew the truth,” he said.
Back home, his worried biological father decided to leave his wife Peng Lianhui in charge of family affairs and set off on a journey across the country.
He began working odd jobs in dozens of provinces, hoping to find Sun Wei in one of them. But he was unsuccessful.
“I stayed in one city for about one month – no more than two – before moving on to the next,” he said.
“But police and rescue shelters all refused to help me because I didn’t have a picture of my boy – they thought I was lying,” he added.
Zhenghua returned home and had two more children with his wife. But the couple never gave up hope of one day seeing their boy again, and registered their DNA with Chinese missing persons authorities.
In the end, however, it took a step from Sun Wei himself to set things in motion.
Having quit school at 14-years-old to work in Shenzhen, Sun Wei was finally persuaded by his friends to register his DNA in the same missing persons database.
Authorities quickly found a match to a similar claim filed by Sun Wei’s parents, and the long-lost relatives were brought together once more in a tearful reunion.
Sun Wei said of his decision to finally inform authorities: “Although I always knew I was ‘taken’, I just did not have it in me to do it at the time.”
“As for how my life will be from now on, it’s very difficult to say. I haven’t made any decisions yet – many things aren’t as simple as they seem,” he added.
