That was until a village playwright called Valerie Chidson decided to research Emma's disappearance for a short fictionalised film after seeing a picture of the teenager in an old village photograph.

Jolie arrived at the Lenval hospital in late June by helicopter from the Provence villa where she and Pitt had been staying with their four other children — Maddox, Pax, Zahara and Shiloh.

The prospect of a large surplus of single men in China alarms Valerie Hudson, a professor at Brigham Young University in the United States.