A Sichuan farmer who prepared his 2-year-old daughter to die because he couldn’t afford her blood transfusions now watches her go to school, as the pit he once dug as her tomb has become her garden of hope.
SICHUAN, China Nine years ago, a desperate father dug a shallow pit in his farmland, not for planting, but for his daughter to be buried in.
In 2017, Zhang Liyong, a farmer from Sichuan province, was told his daughter Zhang Xinlei was suffering from severe thalassemia, a life-threatening inherited blood disorder that prevents the body from producing healthy hemoglobin.
Diagnosed at just two months old, the little girl required regular blood transfusions to survive. Her father spent his entire life savings on treatment until there was nothing left. Convinced he could no longer afford to keep her alive, he made a heartbreaking decision.
He dug a grave himself on the family’s own land. In June 2017, a video that would later go viral showed him lying in that shallow pit beside his two-year-old daughter, playing with her in the dirt. He later explained he did it so she would “not fear death when the day comes”.
The images of a father cradling his sick child inside her own grave sparked outrage and sorrow across China. As the story spread, donations poured in from strangers, giving the family a second chance to seek treatment.
That chance came when Xinlei’s younger brother was born in August 2017. Doctors used cord blood from her baby brother for a stem cell transplant. The transplant was a success. The little girl who once needed constant transfusions to live no longer needed them, and recovered to become a healthy primary school pupil.
Today, Xinlei is in school. She loves drawing and dancing like any other child her age.
And the pit that once symbolized her father’s deepest fear?
Her family filled it with soil and planted it with sunflowers. They now call it “Xinlei’s Magical Garden.”
What was once a grim grave where a father lay holding his daughter, preparing her for death, has been turned into a flower garden a living symbol that love, even in its most hopeless moment, can still bloom.
