Truth lies buried in China as poisoning case rocks coastal town

To friends on the NSW coast she’s a mum who likes to host lavish dinner parties, but Shiyan ‘Jasmine’ Sun – known in China as Sun Wei – is accused of a dark secret.

Jasmine Sun and partner Feiyu Xie at Port Stephens in NSW north of Newcastle. Picture: Liam Mendes / The Australian

In a sprawling double-storey bungalow overlooking the tranquil waters of Salamander Bay on the mid-north coast of NSW, Shiyan “Jasmine” Sun is living a charmed life. To Australian friends, she’s just a normal mum. She volunteers, hosts lavish dinner parties, and is preparing to send her only daughter to a local school.

But Sun – previously known in China as Sun Wei – is accused of harbouring a dark secret. In the mid-1990s, as a young chemistry student at China’s most prestigious university, she came under suspicion of the most serious kind.

Her dorm roommate, the beautiful and popular young fellow student Zhu Ling, had fallen mysteriously ill. The symptoms – acute abdominal pain and loss of appetite – initially baffled doctors.

Then Zhu’s hair began to fall out. A few months later, illness struck again – intense leg pain and then severe dizziness. In early 1995, the symptoms intensified over weeks until Zhu’s facial muscles were severely distorted and her speech became barely intelligible.

On March 20 that year, she fell into a coma.

Thallium poisoning victim Zhu Ling, who passed away in December almost three decades after she was first poisoned. Picture: Supplied.

“Zhu Ling was a truly enviable young woman, showcasing exceptional prowess across various domains,” says a former classmate of Zhu, who played the ancient plucked seven-string Chinese instrument guqin in the same orchestra in which Sun also played.

“Zhu Ling’s musical talent, academic excellence and outstanding sports abilities undoubtedly set her apart.”

As Zhu lay intubated in Peking Union Medical College Hospital in March 1995, doctors ran a battery of tests. They all turned up nothing. With no answers and growing suspicions, friends back at Beijing’s Tsinghua University – from a single portal at one of the very few internet access points in China – issued an international SOS, so launching one of the biggest citizen scientific sleuthing campaigns in Chinese history.

“It was remarkable, the English was a little sloppy, it was desperate,” says John Aldis, who in the mid-1990s was working as a doctor for the US State Department. Aldis was instantly captivated by the mystery.

“I was immediately drawn to the case, very excited by it,” he says. He consulted a colleague, who immediately suspected only one thing: “it’s thallium”.

Zhu Ling's mother Zhu Mingxin, 83 and her father Wu Chengzhi, 84 at her funeral on December 24, 2023.

In Canberra, the pathologist Ted Macarthur was convinced of the same thing. The doctors’ assessment forced eventual testing at a specialist facility in China, which found massive levels of thallium in Zhu’s blood, cerebrospinal fluid, nails and hair samples.

Thallium is a toxic heavy metal, colourless and odourless, and often used as rat poison.

This month, weeks after Zhu finally succumbed to a brain tumour and died aged 50, that global hunt for justice has finally forced a reckoning upon Sun, who for two decades has been the main suspect in her thallium poisoning.

Sun was exposed by The Weekend Australian as living incognito in the Port Stephens area - where she has been buying and selling real estate - after arriving in Australia a decade ago.

The couple decided to move to Salamander Bay around two years ago from their 53 hectare farm in “cliquey” Booral, to the slightly faster paced Port Stephens.

They were looking for a more social life, and with their daughter starting kindergarten this year they wanted a few more options – and the best for her.

On their holiday rental listing, they say they enjoy swimming, kayaking and playing at the various beaches in the Port Stephens area north of Newcastle, as well as riding bikes to the fish market to buy fresh oysters and watch the pelicans on the dock.

The revelation of the poisoning case has shocked locals, with some describing Sun as “really lovely and kind” and “generous and warm”.

Friends and acquaintances have struggled to reconcile the social, affable neighbour with the case of the poisoning of Zhu Ling, who after the incident was confined to a wheelchair, almost blind, her parents forced to cut her food into tiny pieces and hand-feed her, their daughter so disabled she was described as having the mental age of a six-year-old.

“It’s almost like a movie plot, especially in the Bay, you don’t really hear about high-level drama like this,” said one woman who got to know Sun well. “It’s raised more questions than answers, that’s for sure.”

Sun denied the allegation when the thallium poisoning was first confirmed and has always denied it since. She did not respond this week to questions.

Locals in Port Stephens have taken to the internet to research the crime that has now been bizarrely connected with their own region. Citizen police have emerged on Facebook pages, with one local advising that if anyone sees Ms Sun they should “call 000 immediately”. The post was hastily removed.

“The more you go down the rabbit hole the worse it sounds, but at the same time, are you ever going to find out the truth?” said one Port Stephens local.

Ms Sun and her husband Feiyu “Ringo” Xie have sent messages from the ski fields in Japan where they are holidaying, attempting to reassure friends not to believe the accusations.

But when they return, there’s little chance of a quiet life. Millions of people in China are now monitoring Sun, their networks extending even to the quiet streets of Port Stephens.

‘Who has access to her tea?’

For two decades, China’s netizens have steadily uncovered the secrets of Zhu’s poisoner. Aldis has followed the case intently. “The use of the internet to do this was remarkable,” he says. “At the time, it was earth-shaking.

“What I know is a person put thallium into Zhu’s Ling’s cups, probably her tea or her coffee, and probably someone very close to her. So who would this be? Who has access to her tea when she is drinking her tea?”

In 2018, as Sun quietly prospered in Australia, half a world away in the US state of Maryland, a revolutionary form of hair analysis was being performed by US geologist Richard Ash based on samples fortuitously collected by Zhu’s parents.

Ash used a mass spectrometry laser ablation technique usually used to analyse sedimentary rocks to establish that Zhu had been poisoned with thallium over the course of several weeks. There was also some evidence of potential lead poisoning. “We stuck the hair down with double-sided sticky tape, fired the laser along the hair, and we knew that how fast the laser moved along the hair was related to time,” he said.

His resulting scientific paper reported: “hair incorporates heavy metals from the bloodstream into keratin proteins at a relatively constant rate. The distribution profile of a heavy metal along the hair shaft generally correlates well with the dose and time of exposure to this element, hence representing a long-term record which remains unaffected by later homeostasis or excretion.”

Ash speculated that the victim may have been dosed with thallium via her contact lenses initially, followed by oral ingestion in increasing frequency “every few days” over the course of several months between late 1994, when Zhu went completely bald, lost eyesight and experience symptoms abdominal pain. She visited home, recovered, and returned to school, and then in March 1995, when she was admitted to hospital suffering delirium, seizures and convulsions, and eventually fell into a coma.

At that time in China, thanks to an extraordinary international collaboration of scientists that became known as the Thallium Poisoning Telemedicine Network, Zhu was eventually given the remedy Prussian blue. Aldis called upon the help of a friend in the CIA based in Beijing to hand-deliver a letter to the hospital treating Zhu requesting urgent administration of the antidote. It was done, and Zhu began to recover. But the damage could not be reversed - she had lost her memory, she was severely neurologically disabled, and she would never walk again.

Back in Australia, Sun changed her name from Sun Wei to Jasmine Sun, and even allegedly changed her birthday to shed her previous life. But she could not escape the reach of Chinese internet sleuths.

The death of Zhu last December only intensified the international push for justice, as the criminal investigation in China that activists claim was stymied, perhaps because of Sun’s apparent high family connections within the Communist Party, morphed into a murder investigation. In Australia, the allegations against Sun have been referred to the Department of Home Affairs. At this stage any extradition proceedings appear unlikely, as does the chance of Sun ever facing court in China.

But Aldis says Sun cannot escape questions, and she cannot escape her past.

“Right now, after Zhi Ling’s death, everything’s gone hysterical. We can’t rely on the Chinese government to do anything. I can’t think of any other way.”

And so Sun will return to Port Stephens from her holiday to resume a life that has been shattered. She will attempt to repair neighbourhood relationships, but knows that the netizens of China will make a quiet life impossible.

In Beijing, Ling’s parents still have no answers. As they bent down to kiss their daughter as she lay in her casket last December in a Beijing funeral home, wearing customary white flowers on their lapels, Zhu Mingxin, 83, and her father Wu Chengzhi, 84, looked exhausted, defeated, and older than their years.

She was farewelled to the tune of “Guangling San”, a piece Zhu had once played on her guqin at the Beijing Concert Hall in 1994. By then she had already been poisoned.

But justice for Zhu remains elusive, and may never come.

A property at Soldiers Point in the Port Stephens area that is a part of Jasmine Sun’s and her husband Feiyu Xie's property portfolio.

The couple’s Salamander Bay home.

Their property at Nelson Bay.