

A 12-year-old boy in Shanghai who’d been missing for six days after running away from home last Monday was at last discovered yesterday afternoon in an Ikea in the Xuhui district. Because where else would a 12-year-old runaway go?

Peng Yijian, who said he survived on free food samples at supermarkets during his romp about town, is now receiving an intravenous drip at the hospital because he’s ‘very weak with hunger,’ his mother told Shanghai Daily.

The 7th-grade student at Shanghai Longyuan Middle School in Xuhui was reported missing last Tuesday after getting into a row with his mom the day before.

The mother, surnamed Liu, said that she’d received a phone call from Peng’s school that morning informing her that Peng hadn’t done his math homework and was being sent home.

After a fight broke out between Peng and his mother at home, he fled the place with only 1.50 yuan in his pocket.

Police had managed to spot in him security footage wandering around Shanghai South Railway Station on Monday, then at a Carrefour outlet the next day. Officers tracked him for a few days until they finally caught up with him at Ikea, where a dramatic lockdown of sorts ensued.

“We thought there might be other places he likes to visit, so we asked his mother. She gave us eight or nine names, including Caoxi Park, Nanfang Shopping Mall, In Center and IKEA,” Sun said. Officers were dispatched and the boy was spotted by a surveillance camera at the IKEA outlet on Caoxi Road yesterday — 3 kilometers from the Carrefour sighting. After a 40-minute hunt, during which exits were blocked, police found Yijian near an escalator on the ground floor.

The report failed to mention where Peng crashed during his six days on the lam. We can only presume that he was taken in by one of the elderly couples camped out in the Ikea cafeteria.