Stars glittered like jewels in Wukan's tranquil night sky. The sounds of Chaoshan opera echoed in the fishing village's narrow, stony alleys.
It was a calm, mellow evening, in stark and unexpected contrast to the fiery rally just hours earlier.
On that afternoon, December 19, more than 1,000 villagers had gathered in Wukan's central square, the Cultural Revolution's anthem, The East Is Red, blaring through loudspeakers as they renewed their nearly four-month-long protest over land rights.
Their rage had been inflamed by the death in custody of protest leader Xue Jinbo, 42. Officials attributed his death on December 11 to natural causes, but villagers accused police of beating him to death.
In September, the unrest temporarily subsided after the local government promised to investigate the villagers' complaints. The people were also allowed to elect a temporary committee to represent the village - an unusual whiff of democracy.
But in the following weeks, angry villagers continued to petition the government in Lufeng city, which oversees Wukan, denouncing their local officials for 'secretly selling' hundreds of hectares of collectively owned farmland to a property developer since 2006 and 'embezzling' more than 700 million yuan (HK$862.4 million) of compensation the villagers should have received.
Local authorities declared the petitions illegal and brutally cracked down. More than a dozen villagers, including children, were beaten.