Send us Fan Mail

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.