Located in a remote part of the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, the tiny village of Yangxi is full of mysteries. Now only about 80 people live here, but almost half of them are dwarfs, their height does not exceed 117 cm.
The village of Yancy is practically isolated from the world and surrounded by mountains and rice fields, but there have been various rumors and legends about it for many decades. There were stories about mysterious local little people back in the 19th century, so the dwarfism of local residents is not a consequence of industrial pollution of the environment, but something else.
In 1947, English doctor Caril Robin Evans, interested in this phenomenon, specially came to this village to carefully study the dwarfs. In those years, much more people lived here, and Evans counted several hundred dwarfs alone. He made a good outline of his observations and was the first to show the West not fairy gnomes, but a mysterious medical phenomenon.
Since 1951, the village of Yancy became more open and other doctors flocked here. It was found that about 40% of local residents suffer from congenital dwarfism and this genetic defect is perfectly transmitted from generation to generation. The local birth rate of dwarfs is very far from the norm, which is usually only 1 in 20,000 newborns, and the strangest thing is that no one knows why.
At first they thought that there might be something like that in the local water and food. Scientists have done many analyzes, checked the soil, wells, springs, ponds, crops grown in the fields. And nothing unusual was found.
There seems to be no rational explanation as to why there is such a high percentage of dwarf births in this small village. Dwarfs can be born in much more isolated communities, where closely related marriages are also frequent, but nowhere is there such a large number of them as in this village.
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Another popular theory says that this was the result of secret government experiments or a consequence of poisonous gas attacks carried out by the Japanese during the Second World War, although there is no physical evidence of either, and dwarfs, as stated above, were seen here in the 19th century … Moreover, the Japanese did not reach this province.
Another theory is that it is due to a mysterious disease that is easily inherited. The elders say that once upon a time there were almost no dwarfs in the village, but once an incomprehensible disease hit the residents and many children from 5 to 7 years old simply stopped growing. They also developed rashes, joint problems and hair loss.
However, no medical examinations of modern dwarfs have revealed the slightest traces of a mysterious illness. No radiation was found either.
Even stranger are various supernatural theories. Many elderly villagers believe that this is a curse imposed on them by someone powerful and evil. Or maybe their ancestors were angry with them for something.
Also in the village they tell a tale about a mystical black turtle with strange legs, which appeared here many years ago. The villagers caught the turtle and killed it to eat. According to this legend, the magic black turtle, before death, managed to impose a curse on the village and doomed people to eternal growth retardation and deformation of the limbs.
Rumors about the curse are so strong that many locals leave the village to recover. Now only about 80 people live in the village, but in 20-30 years only a few dwarfs will most likely live in the village, and then only legends will remain of Yancy.