Ms. Zhou and her husband, Mr. Su, the tea farmer, were still in mourning in October 2007 when they spotted a child at a Buddhist temple in their village, Dailai, a picturesque hamlet of 800 people nestled in the fold of steep mountains. “The boy was eating candy like he was hungry,” Mr. Su recalled. “Everything he was wearing was too small for him.”

A man with the boy claimed to be his father. He said that he was from a nearby town and had three sons, but that he needed money to take his ill wife to the hospital. “I asked how much,” said Mr. Su, an earnest man who works long hours in a clothing factory when he is not tending his tea plants.

After some quick bargaining, the price was dropped to $3,500 from $4,100, and a few hours later, after borrowing money from friends and family members, they took the boy home. They named him Jiabao, which means “guarantor of the family.”

Their love for their new son was boundless. They bought him new clothing and had their daughter drop out of middle school to take care of him. They did not think much of the fact that Jiabao did not understand the dialect spoken in that part of Fujian and seemed indifferent to the local cuisine. Mr. Su insisted that he never imagined that the boy had been stolen.

Last August, Mr. Su learned the truth after the police in Sichuan Province arrested the man who had sold them the child. The man, part of a ring of seven people who had abducted 11 children, had sold four of them to families in their township. The man, according to the police, has since been given a 12-year sentence.

By the time the couple got home from work the day they got the news, their son and the three other stolen children in their village had already been taken away by the police. The couple was inconsolable. “We were lied to, we were swindled,” Mr. Su said as his wife’s eyes welled up.

There was, however, a small consolation. A sympathetic policeman in Sichuan, the province where the boy was stolen, helped put them in touch with his birth parents. The two couples have since been in frequent contact; Mr. Su said the real parents held no grudge, acknowledging that the family had cared for their son well.

The father was so grateful, he told Mr. Su he would be on the lookout for local families who had two sons but were too poor to care for them. “He said that way I don’t need to deal with child traffickers anymore,” Mr. Su said.