Almost Every Couple in This Rural Chinese Village Mysteriously Has 1 Boy, 1 Girl

— -- For more than three decades, China made it illegal for most parents to have more than one child, what became known as the so-called “one child rule,” but there are some villages the Chinese government gave special dispensation for couples to have two kids each.

And mysteriously, almost every couple in the village of Zhanli has managed to give birth to exactly one boy and one girl.

Villagers say it’s made possible because of a centuries-old secret kept by a medicine doctor named Mrs. Wu.

She claims to help women choose the gender of their child, and says it starts with mysterious herbs she gets from the hills near the town.

“Before they get pregnant, when they're ready to have a child, [couples will] go to her and they start to take the herbs, the medicine, and then the medicine's going to change the body, and then it's going to help, you know, if you tell them you want a boy or a girl,” Mrs. Wu said through a translator.

Mrs. Wu said there is one kind of herb for boys and another for girls, all used to make a medicine that women take before they get pregnant, and villagers swear by it.

The medicine doctor wouldn’t reveal what the plants looked like, saying it was a secret from the ancestors. Not even the local villagers know the specifics, she said.

Mrs. Wu said she keeps the herbs hidden inside the attic of her house. She said she didn't care about money, and that this secret was not for sale.

According to her, the water in two wells near the village also give parents power to choose the gender of their children -- the well on the right is for girls, and the one on the left is for boys.

But even still, the villagers try to leave nothing to chance. Twice a year, they hold a festival with a mysterious ritual that seems to defy common sense, science and even nature itself. During the festival, soon-to-be married couples swear to give birth to two children after they’ve married: a boy and a girl. They drink pig’s blood to seal the deal -- even the village children drink it.

According to Mrs. Wu, it almost always works and it will work 100 percent of the time if they come to her.

Having more than two children here results in punishment and the “wrong” combination of children ends in shame on the family. There are signs posted all over the village warning people against having more children. Even the art on the walls of the village show couples with a boy and a girl each, no siblings of the same sex.

Almost every family in this village has stuck to the rule, but it hasn’t worked for everyone. One villager said he did the ritual and took the herbs, but ended up with two sons. Another family had two daughters.

But Reggie Littlejohn, the founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, an international coalition to expose and oppose forced abortion, has her concerns about what’s going on in the village of Zhanli.

“The fact that in this village every couple has one boy and one girl makes me worried about second daughters,” she said. "How is it that if the first child is a girl that the second child is always a boy? Are they practicing sex-selective abortion?"

The villagers say they have no need for modern medical techniques to produce one boy and one girl for each family.

The “one child rule” in China produced a huge shortage of women all over the country -- about 120 men for every 100 women -- leaving many young men scrambling to find a wife. Just this year, China officially changed its one-child law to allow two children, but experts say it will take many years before there are equal numbers of men and women in China.

But in this village at least, there will be a bride for every groom.