Sold in Myanmar and trafficked to China

Eight thousand yuan ($1,300; £830): That was the price for a cute four-year-old Burmese girl from a broken home.

Crouched in the doorway of her bamboo house, Khin Khin Oo's grandmother Ma Shan told me the story. "I grow corn and rice but my son is a heroin addict so we have no money," she said.

Ma Shan's family life is in disarray. Just a couple of metres away in the dark of the house, her son sits listening to us talk about him, staring blankly ahead.

Ma Shan's daughter isn't in much better shape. She ran off with another man (according to Ma Shan, having been drugged with spiked orange juice), leaving her two small children to live with her parents.

One of them, an energetic boy, plays in the mud by the stilts of the bamboo house, as we look at pictures of his sister Khin Khin Oo.

"One day her father Soe Khine came back for her," Ma Shan recounted. "But after she'd been away four days I knew something was wrong."

A childhood photograph of Khin Khin Oo

"One day her father Soe Khine came back for her," Ma Shan recounted. "But after she'd been away four days I knew something was wrong."

At that point, the Burmese police became involved. They found Soe Khine and he confessed that with the help of a local Kachin woman, he had sold his daughter to a Chinese trafficker.

The police followed the trail to the Chinese border town of Ruili, where they discovered that Khin Khin Oo had been traded again, this time for 12,000 yuan ($2,000; £1,277), to a childless couple who wanted to adopt.

After a week and a joint operation with the Chinese police, Khin Khin Oo was rescued and returned to her grandmother.

"While she was gone, I didn't even want to eat. I was so worried," she said.

Luckily Khin Khin Oo had been well treated, with the Chinese couple seemingly unaware that she'd been trafficked.

She was returned to her grandmother in Hankan who, fearing for her safety, sent her back to China this time to live with an aunt.

(BBC)