With the help of a map of his home village drawn from memory, a Chinese man was reunited with his mother from whom he was kidnapped and sold by a child trafficking ring to a family living 1,100 miles away, the BBC reports.

Li Jingwei was just four years old when he was taken by a child trafficking ring from Zhaotong, a region of five million people, in the northeast Chinese province of Yunnan, in 1989.  Li got no help from his adoptive parents, who live in Guangdong Province in southern China, when asking about his birthplace.  Searches of genetic databases online also proved frutiless.

On December 24, Li posted a video to the Chinese social media site Douyin in which he showed a hand-drawn map of what he remembered from his home village.   “I’m a child who’s finding his home. I was taken to Henan by a bald neighbour around 1989, when I was about four years old,” he said in the video.  “This is a map of my home area that I have drawn from memory,” holding up a drawing which showed a pond, a bamboo forest and a building he believed to be a school.

Chinese police then matched his description to reports from 1989 about missing children, and they were able to identify the case and the family.  He was preparing to see his birth mother for the first time in a third of a century.  “Thirty-three years of waiting, countless nights of yearning, and finally a map hand-drawn from memory, this is the moment of perfect release after 13 days,” Mr Li wrote on his Douyin profile ahead of the anticipated reunion. “Thank you, everyone who has helped me reunite with my family.”

About 20,000 children are typically abducted each year in China.