If approved the study is sent with a US$750 translation fee to the China Centre of Adoption

If approved, the study is sent with a US$750 “translation fee” to the China Centre of Adoption Affairs in Peking which – about nine months later – writes back with a medical report and photograph of the baby put up for adoption. The cost varies wildly from nothing to over pounds 3,000, depending on where one lives. Sometimes Chinese mothers cut a baby’s ear before abandoning her, in the vain hope of later having an identifying mark.In the UK, the adoption of an overseas child starts with a home study report by a local authority, an ordeal which most parents say is the hardest part. And that is a very hard thing to come to terms with.” Nor is the agony of the birth mothers lost on the new parents. “There is no information about the medical background of the family at all,” adds Janet, “You have to accept that.”Tokiko, 38, who works in publishing, remarks: “The one worry I have is that, as Ella gets older, her history will be incomplete We are concerned about how to prepare her to deal with it They are all abandoned, these children. He and his Japanese-born, British-raised wife, Tokiko Morishima, are adopting 11-month-old Ella, from little Olivia’s old orphanage, Shanggao.

So we would be able to deal with it,” says economist Peter Roscoe, 39, from Lambeth. But our preparation means we are told all the different things that might be a problem. What is not spoken of, although it is common knowledge, is that a few adopting parents have had the devastating experience of turning up to find that their baby was too sick to adopt, forcing them to decide whether to opt for a different child.”There will always be uncertainty before you get there, because the medical report is out of date, and not as comprehensive as you would wish. Says Pete: “It is mainly that she should be healthy.” Janet adds: “I think my main concern is attachment problems, where the baby is unable to relate to us. Obviously you read as much as possible about adoption.” Pete adds: “And what you normally read are the horror stories.”In the UK, an e-mail network now exists to put people adopting from China in touch with each other, with pictures on the Internet of Chinese orphanages and personal adoption stories. We’re getting a child.”Friday brings sightseeing, to help pass the final agonising wait. There are silent anxieties as everyone climbs the Great Wall.

Thirteen-month-old Viola was left at the gates of a factory in Nanfeng when she was one day old. For David and Lorna, this is a repeat visit to the Taiwan Hotel; they stayed here in April 1997 when they adopted Olivia.Well over 5,000 Chinese babies were adopted by foreign parents last year, an extraordinary twist of fate for an abandoned peasant girl “It’s a two-way thing,” says Janet “Obviously we are helping her to a different life But at the same time, she’s helping us. So we have a sense of how she might be, how you hope she’ll be,” he adds. “For a while I had it as a screen-saver so every time I switched my computer on, this little face came up,” says David Keltie, a 52-year-old project management consultant from Edinburgh, who is here with his wife, Lorna Easton, 38, a Scottish Tourist Board senior manager “You read all kinds of character into the face.