It was a baby, wrapped in a thin sheet.

"Everybody was just looking. Nobody would do anything,'' recalled Chen, who was 65 on that bitterly cold, snowy day 17 years ago. "When I took her home, she was frozen stiff. My wife and I wrapped her in a burlap bag. We started a fire. We fed her soup and put some old clothes on her. A while later, she started to wriggle.''

Chen named her Ling-Ling.

Today, Chen still makes a living as a scavenger in Anding, a remote Chinese town of 460,000 people on the edge of the Gobi Desert. And he is still bringing home children - 42 in all, at the last count.

Many had been abandoned because they had physical disabilities. Over the years, Chen has developed such a reputation as a keeper of castaway kids that even local officials have sent them his way. They know Chen would never reject any child, no matter how imperfect.

"Nobody else wants them, because they are afraid of trouble,'' said Chen's 81-year-old wife, Zhang Lanying. "They think these children are dirty. But I pity them. They are human beings.''

As the world's most populous nation, China is home to the largest number of disabled people on Earth: About 60 million. Despite a 14-year-old anti-discrimination law that guarantees equal rights, society's attitude towards the disabled has been slow to change. Handicapped access in public places is rare. Employment prospects are grim.

Although in recent years they have made up only about 5 percent of the general population, mentally and physically disabled people account for about one-third of the unemployed and their living conditions are worse than average Chinese.

For some Chinese parents, the prospect of watching their disabled children experience a lifetime of stigma is too terrible to bear. According to recent media reports, Beijing police took in more than 400 children abandoned in the Chinese capital last year, about 80 percent of them born with physical deformities, organ abnormalities or mental impairment.

"I'd say 99 percent of the children here were abandoned because they were born with severe disability,'' said Shi Guihua, a staff worker at a welfare center in a Beijing surburb that pays foster families to take care of about 600 children. "Many of them were left on hospital benches by parents who couldn't afford to treat them.''

Small towns such as Anding, in northwestern China's impoverished Gansu province, don't have such welfare centers, which are funded by the state and corporate donors.

Local officials say they have sent castaways to Chen because they have no other way of caring for them. A new orphanage sits empty because it takes too much money to operate. A handful of staff are paid to guard the vacant building.

Instead of using the orphanage, local officials pay Chen and his wife to do the work for them: Less than US$80 (HK$624) per month for the eight children the elderly couple now care for.

That meager sum, plus the little cash Chen brings in by picking through trash and all the love the couple can muster, has been enough to save dozens of children from death.

Chen, a sturdy 82-year-old with deep lines in his sun-baked face, has the equivalent of one year of primary education. When he was younger, he worked as a laborer. After the economic reforms of the late 1970s, he started peddling tea at the local train station and collected garbage on the side. After becoming a full-time parent, he gave up the tea business.

His first wife left him long before that, taking with her their two children, now in their 60s. He married Zhang more than 50 years ago. They have no children of their own. But they say they have cherished every one of the youngsters who have come into their three-room brick shack across the street from the train station.

Their oldest now is 12-year-old Yuan-Yuan. She was born with a lump on her skull the size of a peach. Someone had left her in the yard of the local municipal building. No one wanted anything do with this frightening-looking child who was probably then a year old. Chen took her home.

Chen and Zhang finally saved enough money three years ago to pay for an operation to remove the growth and allow Yuan-Yuan to live a more normal life. It cost about US$80.

Like the rest of the children, Yuan Yuan calls Chen and Zhang Grandpa and Grandma, or Yeye and Nainai.

"We love our grandparents. They work so hard for us,'' said Yuan Yuan who, during a lunch break from school, helps wash the dishes, pour hot water into thermoses and bring chairs for Yeye and Nainai.

"I don't miss my parents,'' Yuan-Yuan said. "They are so cruel. They left us because they knew we were sick.''

The youngest child now is two-year-old Ling-Ling, named after the baby Chen found at the railway station. The first Ling-Ling never recovered fully from being left in the snow and suffered from frequent coughs and seizures. She never crawled or walked and died when she was four.

Chen found Ling-Ling's namesake crying in an alley. Born with a hunchback and uneven legs, she was just days old. Now the round-faced girl with pretty eyes loves to cling to Yeye and Nainai and keep them company while most of the older children are in school.

"If you throw a puppy out on the street, someone might pick it up, but throw a baby out on the street and no one bothers,'' Nainai said as she cuddled Ling-Ling close to her chest.

The sickest child in the household is nine-year-old Long-Long, paralyzed and suffering from liver disease. Chen found him one day when he went to fetch water for the house. Long-Long, then a baby, was in a paper box under a blazing sun, crying.

"I came home and told my wife. She said, `We already have too many children; we can't take on any more,''' Chen recalled. "I sat on my stool and just couldn't get over it. So I went and brought him home.''

Whereas Long-Long requires a walker to get around and needs help for virtually everything, Jin-Jin, four, can't sit still.

Chen found the mentally impaired boy sleeping on a hospital lawn. He was three or four months old and naked. Nothing appeared to be wrong with him. The older Jin-Jin got, however, the more his problems became apparent.

Another child in the house, Quan-Quan, was born with a cleft palate. Chen found him when he was about a year old at the local farmers' market, crawling on the dirt and eating rotten vegetables.

"Everybody knew he had been abandoned for days and was starving,'' Chen said.

"He couldn't walk yet, and his neck was this thin,'' Zhang said, shaping her thumb and forefinger into a ring. Today, six-year-old Quan-Quan is smart, performs well in school and loves to help his brothers. When not guarding Jin-Jin, he plays with a tiny kitten and 10-year-old Qiang-Qiang, an undersized boy with a bad heart.

Of the 42 children Chen and Zhang have taken in over the years, 21 turned out to be healthy or suffering from very mild disabilities and were adopted. Thirteen very sick children died. The loss of Ling-Ling, their first child, still hurts the most.

"She was very pretty,'' said Chen, pointing to a wall of collage photos showing all his "grandchildren.''

"We buried her in a ditch by the river,'' he said. "We couldn't afford cremation.''

Even when the children are doing well, it's not been easy supporting such a large family on the income of a scavenger.

Now Chen worries that local officials may take his children away on the grounds that he is too old to be their caretaker. He believes a recent flurry of news reports about the children that suggested official negligence had embarrassed local officials.

Wang Yanfu, deputy head of the district civil administration bureau, said officials were prepared to rent a house and hire two workers to feed and care for Chen's children.

"We sent him the kids before because he was young, in his 60s. Now he is too old,'' Wang said. "We are trying our best to convince him [to quit]. But if he doesn't want to, there's nothing we can do. It has to be voluntary.''

Chen says he can't trust the government to do what's best for the children. He said local officials continued to offer him abandoned children until only a few years ago.

"I don't understand policy,'' he said. "All I know is that when they were little, no one would help them. They say I am too old. I say I will raise them for as long as I can. They'll have to kill me first before I let them take the kids away.''