A 91-YEAR-OLD man’s sketches illustrating his six-decade-long marriage have circulated on the Internet, leaving many Chinese netizens in tears.

    Rao Pingru, a native of Jiangxi Province now living in Shanghai, has spent the past four years drawing 200 pictures in 18 albums, depicting his wife Mao Meitang, who died in 2008 in her early 80s. They were married for 60 years.

    The albums, titled “Our Stories,” are due to be released next month, but by Sunday morning excerpts had been re-posted around 260,000 times on China’s Twitter-like microblogging services.

    Rao, who fought in the Anti-Japanese War, depicts in a drawing the first time he met Meitang, in 1946.

    “I walked into her house, and saw a pretty twenty-something girl sitting in front of a mirror putting on lipstick. Such was my first impression of Meitang,” Rao, a former magazine editor, wrote in the caption.

    With his pencil and crayons, Rao has recorded details of what he remembers about Meitang.

    He has sketched their dates, wedding ceremony, the first meal that she made for them, their first fight, her toiling to support their five children and her suffering from kidney disease.

    One illustration shows the pair on a date in a park, during which Rao was too shy to say “I love you,” but instead sang a then-popular English song “Oh Rosemary I Love You.”

    He has also sketched how Meitang shed her last tear on her deathbed. It was March 19, 2008, when the family paid their last visit to the hospital.

    “We shared life and death, weal and woe. I am now drowned in memories of you, which are deeper than the sea,” Rao wrote in the title pages of the albums. (Xinhua)