The 52-year-old widower nevertheless held on to a sense of justice, his half-sister and neighbours say, believing that a senior official was going to offer him reasonable compensation for his long-destroyed home. But then the official was transferred.

The morning of the explosions, Qian was telling a neighbour about the transfer of the official from the district prosecution department. He said he kept calling other officials but got no response.

'I guess that's the trigger that made him make up his mind to bomb the procuratorate building after years of fruitless petitioning,' said Chen Dan, the owner of a small plant next to Qian's shop. Qian bombed three Linchuan government buildings within 27 minutes on the morning of May 26. The eight-storey prosecutors' office was shaken by a massive explosion in a van fully loaded with explosives in its underground car park at 9.18am, with almost all its windows smashed and a huge plume of white smoke rising into the sky, according to the Shanghai-based China Business News.

The second blast came 11 minutes later, after a security guard stopped a van driven by Qian from entering the district government office's car park. The security guard and one of his colleagues died.

The third blast took place near the food and drug administration office at 9.45am. Xinhua said Qian died at the scene of one of the three blasts, which also injured five other people and destroyed many cars.

Chen says she has no idea why Qian also exploded a bomb outside the food and drug administration office.

'To be honest, I couldn't believe he was really dead at first,' Chen says, with tears in her eyes. 'I thought it could be a trick by the authorities to fool the general public, avoid potential unrest and restore social order.

'Of course, it was a mistake for him to kill two innocent people, but from my point of view, I would rather he was still alive because he was such a decent and kind-hearted person.'

Qian made a good living from renting refrigerated coffins from his shop in their impoverished suburban village. For the past three years, he allowed Chen and her husband to stay for free in his former office, an old two-storey building next door, after their own home was demolished to make way for a road. Qian helped the young couple repair the roof and their refrigerator for free - proof, Chen says, that he was not a greedy person.

One of Qian's neighbours says he was not surprised that Qian was able to make the bombs because his technical proficiency was obvious from the way he designed and built his refrigerated coffins.

Qian became the hottest topic among mainland internet users after the bombings, with many saying he was brave to take on the authorities and try to send corrupt officials to their deaths.

However, Qian's 40-year-old half-sister, Zhang Yilan, says her brother was timid, law-abiding and afraid of getting into trouble.

'I still remember he once operated a shop collecting and reselling second-hand products when he was young,' she says. 'To my surprise, he abruptly decided to fold the shop when he noticed someone had sold him stolen things, even though his business was running quite well at that time. He was simply too scared of doing anything that broke the law.'

She says that when she was a child, their family was so poor that sometimes their stomachs were half empty. Lack of money forced her brother to quit school after the third year of primary school, even though he was an excellent student.

Qian borrowed from neighbours to be able to afford his wedding and hardly ever quarrelled with his wife in more than two decades of marriage. 'When my sister-in-law fell ill later, my brother spared no effort to seek help to cure her,' she says.

Zhang says her brother's kindness also extended to strangers from an early age. Once, he was making containers out of thin bamboo strips and noticed a passing beggar carrying a heavy load. 'He immediately made the beggar a shoulder pole, so that he could carry his things more easily.'

Chen says Qian told her his five-storey home was demolished by the local authorities in 2002 to make way for the construction of a highway connecting Beijing and Fujian. He had saved up to build it after the forced demolition of his first home, also to make way for a highway, seven years earlier.

'He said he was incensed when he learned that the highway did not actually end up going through the site of his demolished home, leaving the ground a desolate wasteland years after the destruction,' she says. Qian told her that his second house was worth at least 3 million yuan (HK$3.6 million), but he was offered no more than 250,000 yuan in compensation.

And that was not where Qian's demolition woes ended. About three years ago, Chen says, part of Qian's shop and her home next door were torn down to allow the road in front of the buildings to be widened.

'My bedroom was levelled while Qian's office remained,' she says. 'That's why I moved in his office with my husband until now.'

One of the 53 messages Qian left on his Sina Weibo microblog before his death reads: 'I ought to expect a certain amount of punishment if I robbed somebody of 10 yuan on the street. How come they can destroy my home, which was built fully in accordance with the law, but not properly compensate me?'

Over the years, Chen says, Qian occasionally wrote big-character anti-government slogans or couplets on the remaining wall of his shop, which faced the road. One said: 'The prosecution department is no different from a cradle of corrupt officials.'

She says: 'Whenever the local authorities sent someone around to whitewash away his critical verses, Qian always painted a brand new one.'

In a posting on his microblog early last month, Qian accused the head of the Linchuan district government, Xi Dongsen, of embezzling more than 10 million yuan of land requisition funds and eviction allowances when he was in charge of party discipline, before dividing it up with his colleagues. Qian said Xi's actions cost him more than 2 million yuan.

Xi was removed from his post on Saturday, along with district party secretary Fu Qing.

A police officer who investigated Qian's case says he refused to accept an empty lot on which he could build a house and instead insisted he deserved a much more valuable piece of land zoned for industrial and commercial use.

However, Qian's neighbours deny his compensation demands were excessive.

'Almost everyone around here knows that Qian's five-storey building was the best, in terms of both its construction and decoration,' says 36-year-old farmer Xu Ping from Jiangjia village, where Qian lived for nearly 10 years before his death. 'You never have any choice but to let them demolish your home whenever the government asks you to make way for this or that. Without exception, we ordinary civilians will swallow the disappointment. In our whole country, he is the only one who has dared to stand up and fight back in that way.'

He describes Qian as an amiable, moderate and decent man. 'I've never heard of him ever being embroiled in any disputes with anyone around here,' Xu says.

Qian turned to the central government for help and petitioned in Beijing many times after his home was demolished. The Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post reported that an unfolded map of central Beijing was found next to Qian's bed, in a room decorated with a photo of Qian in Tiananmen Square and a line reading: 'Unforgettable petition path.'

Chen says Qian told her he was once thrown into a 'black jail' when he was spotted by police from Jiangxi who had been sent to intercept petitioners in Beijing.

Another neighbour says Qian was beaten up by 'thugs' before being locked up in a psychiatric asylum for around a month.

'In the hope of obtaining justice, Qian really suffered too much and paid a lot over the years,' he says.

Members of families evicted at the same time as Qian and who petitioned with him say they have come under intense official pressure to remain silent.

Meanwhile, forced demolitions are continuing.

One young man said that the day before the bombings, he saw two protesting women dragged from their home in nearby Wangjia village before the house was knocked to the ground. Family members who blocked the road were beaten by 60 or so police officers.

A local peasant in his 60s says Fuzhou officials in charge of demolitions and evictions are notoriously corrupt.

'There is almost nothing that can be called justice or rights here, otherwise the bombings would not have happened,' he says. 'I have been living here for decades and things have been getting worse and worse in the past few years.

'Some have suggested that Qian was actually bombing the morally degenerate. I couldn't agree more.'

4.1m

The number of forced evictions reported in China between 1995 and 2005, according to figures from a UN report in 2007