During his time as a fruit seller on the streets of Chengdu, China, Wang Mingqing briefly left his three-year-old alone while he went to a neighbouring stall to get change for a customer.

When he returned, Qifeng was gone.

That was way back in 1994, and a desperate hunt that would last for more than two decades began, reports The Telegraph:

As soon as they noticed she had gone missing, Wang Mingqing and his wife Liu Chengying frantically shouted out her name, and desperately asked shoppers if they had seen their daughter.

They also spent weeks wandering around the neighbourhood until late in the evening, before returning home and crying at the sight of the young girl’s clothes still hanging in her bedroom.

In 2015, Wang became a taxi driver and scoured the city every day during his work hours. He even put up a sign in his car, printed business cards and would tell every passenger what had happened, The Guardian:

His story was picked up first by local newspapers and then the national broadcaster, China Central Television, but it was not until this year, when a police sketch artist drew an image of what his daughter might look like as an adult, that the case reached her attention.

Meanwhile, Qifeng was living “thousands of miles away in the northern province of Jilin”, and had been told by her adopted parents that she was found on the road. Curious about her biological parents, she went on a hunt, which is when she saw the sketch that looked remarkably like her.

According to the BBC, Qifeng made contact with her parents earlier this year after coming across the online post about them:

She … found that she shared some unusual traits with his missing daughter, including a small scar on her forehead and a tendency to get nauseous whenever she cried.

They quickly arranged for a DNA test. This time, the result was positive – Mr Wang had finally found his long-lost child.

At the tearful reunion Wang hugged her and said: “Daddy loves you”:

“From now on, your father is here.” Images of the reunion were shown on TV and on social media. “You don’t need to worry about anything,” he continued. “Your father will support you.”

And the whole family got involved:

“Our daughter only knew our first names and did not know where we lived,” her mother, Liu, recalled in a tearful TV interview. “For the next six months, I would walk and my husband would ride his bike searching for her. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Respect for those parents that never gave up.

[source:bbc&theguardian&thetelegraph]