Four ancestral paintings collectively worth RMB1 million. A mysterious theft. A frantic search for the culprit. It may seem like the stuff of B-list thrillers, but on February 4 of this year, all three of the above happened in the sleepy little town of Guanghai, under the administration of the county-level city Taishan in Guangdong Province.
At 8.30am on the 4th, the border police station in Guanghai got notice from a person by the surname of Huang that four valuable paintings had disappeared from the Huang ancestral hall.
The paintings were self-portraits of family forebears, the victim reported, with 700 years of history. Together, they were worth around RMB1 million. The victim urged police to find the thief and return the paintings as quickly as possible.
One of the Huang family paintings.
When police arrived on the scene soon afterwards, they found that there had been no surveillance cameras installed near the precious portraits. Still, they were able to crack the case fairly quickly.
According to the victim, the paintings were a well-kept secret; people from outside the neighborhood were unlikely to even know that they existed.
By searching for people in Guanghai with a history of theft, police pinpointed a suspect, also surnamed Huang, who fit the profile. According to local residents, he'd been spotted at the scene of the crime earlier as well. When police searched the suspect's home shortly afterward, they found all four paintings hidden away in the man's henhouse.
Huang, the suspect, also openly confessed to the crime. Apparently he was an inveterate gambler who had lost all his money while gaming with friends over the Lunar New Year holidays. He hatched a plan to steal the ancestral Huang paintings, but he hadn't even gotten the chance to sell them off before he was discovered by police, just three hours after the crime was first reported.
[Image via Southern Metropolis Daily]
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