Inside the cardboard box there is an orange hair tie, a packet of Q-tips, lipstick, other cosmetics and a deck of playing cards: all of these items were left behind by Afang, Li Yongshuai’s Vietnamese mail-order bride, when she disappeared last year.

Li, a corn farmer from the village of Feixiang in China’s Hebei province, turns each object over in his hand as though it contains some crucial clue and then methodically replaces it. Finally, he produces a photo of Afang. She looks 19 or 20 and is posing with a hand on one hip against a painted backdrop of a beach.

Some shiny material, resembling glitter, is stuck to the glass picture frame near her head. Asked what it is, Li says it was where she painted over her face with nail polish a few days before she left. He now realises she meant to say she was leaving, and that he should not wait for her. He scraped the nail polish off and still keeps the photo.