UNBEARABLE PAIN: On January 7, Yuan Lihai is consoled by Kuai Le, one of her foster daughters. Yuan was hospitalized for high blood pressure after a fire killed six of her foster children three days earlier (CFP)

For two decades, Yuan Lihai, an illiterate woman in Lankao County, central China's Henan Province, had been respected for her loving heart. In 1987, Yuan brought home an abandoned newborn with a cleft lip and took care of him as her own child. The charitable action fueled by motherly nature has never stopped.

Since then Yuan has fostered more than 100 abandoned children, many with congenital conditions such as infantile paralysis, albinism and mental disorders, and supported them by running vendor stalls beside a hospital gate. Some children she rescued over the years are now adults with families.

Yuan, who is also the biological mother to one daughter and two sons, has become a local celebrity for her acts of kindness. People even left unwanted infants at her doorstep. Although her home has been an unregistered and unlicensed foster home in violation of regulations, the local government had been acquiescent and sometimes even actively supportive until recently. Besides distributing food and cash irregularly to Yuan, the local government has also qualified her and 19 of her foster children for subsistence subsidies, 87 yuan ($14) per person per month.

That was until one of her wards, playing with fire, ignited a blaze engulfing the two-story house that sheltered 18 of Yuan's foster children on the morning of January 4, 2013. The fire claimed the lives of six children under 5 years old who were abandoned for birth defects such as deafness and cerebral palsy, as well as Yuan's 20-year-old foster son who suffered from congenital leg deformities. One 11-year-old was also injured. Yuan was walking her other foster children to school at the time of the fire.

Media inquiry into the disaster turned Yuan into a controversial figure. In defense of their actions, local civil affairs officials said that Yuan could not be persuaded to send her foster children to a government-run orphanage because of her reluctance to abandon deep bonds with the children.

People were also shocked to hear Yuan saying that at least 30 percent of the children she adopted died prematurely due to their poor health conditions and her inability to afford complicated medical treatment.

However, Yuan's experience revealed more of the failure of China's child welfare system and the badly needed support to non-governmental children's facilities.

"If I didn't take the babies home, they would be dying out there," Yuan told Yangcheng Evening News, a newspaper published in Guangzhou, southern Guangdong Province, on January 5. An important reason behind the surge of Yuan's foster children was that Lankao, one of the poorest counties in Henan with a population of around 800,000, doesn't have a public orphanage. The plan to build one was only approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) in December 2012 and construction is scheduled to start this year.

Not long ago, orphans and abandoned children from the area were rejected by the only government-run orphanage in Kaifeng, a city not far from Lankao, due to limited capacity, Feng Jie, a local civil affairs official told The Beijing News. It was not until September 2011 that the homeless shelter provided temporary care for deserted infants before sending them to the orphanage in Kaifeng.