Chinese village stops producing twins after well is abandoned
RESIDENTS of a Chinese community which has seen 16 of its 50 households produce twins commonly tell visitors who want to know their secret: “There’s something in the water.”
For the phenomenon of “twin village” was attributed to the “pure and sweet” water from the local well.
But now that the well has been abandoned, only two sets of twins have been born in the village, leaving locals to blame the introduction of running water for the lack of multiple births.
The small village of Fanshang, in China’s central Hubei province, was called “twin village” by locals due to its high number of twins – a birth rate said to be 12 times the global average.
Most of the twins recorded over 50 years were born in the Eighties, when a well was the village’s main source of water. Tap water has since been introduced, and a significant reduction in the number of twins has followed, locals said. But it has not deterred visitors from visiting the village in the hope of finding the secret of having twins. And the villagers appear to enjoy its fame. “Lots of people come to the village to seek the secret of producing twins,” said a report in the local
“The local people all say that you need to drink the water from the old well.”
The well was located far from pollution in a “beautiful, fresh and green site”, at the foot of “white rock cliffs”, the report said.
The spike in twins was recorded in a specific community of 50 households within the village. Local media reports also suggest that many people live to a very old age in the village, which has dozens of residents aged above 80.
Local government official Chen Mingyuan, who has twin daughters, says he cannot recognise the siblings when they appear together in a picture, saying he can only tell them apart as one is taller than the other. “No matter if it’s because of the well, or if it is down to our genes, the ‘twin village’ has become well-known now,” he said.
A village of 4,000 people in Ukraine gained international attention earlier this year after it emerged that it is home to 58 pairs of twins. Locals in Velikaya Kopanya also said their drinking water was behind the phenomenon.
People commenting online about the Chinese village drew their own conclusions about the number of twins. “I think maybe they use some medicine to beat the one child policy,” one said, referring to the birth control laws that operated in China for decades.