When Jessica Choi Yuk-chun sealed the windows and doors of her bedroom, lit charcoal in a barbecue grill and then lay down to die in her village house in Sheung Shui in November 1998, she cannot have imagined the appalling repercussions of her lonely death.
The 35-year-old insurance executive left a note asking for her two pet dogs to be looked after. She also left a deadly legacy that is claiming the lives of 300 people a year in Hong Kong alone, as well as growing numbers of suicidal people in Japan, Taiwan, Macau, the mainland and Chinese communities as far away as New Zealand.
No one knows how Choi came to take her life this way, but she is credited with inventing a method of suicide that has developed into an alarming regional trend.
A new study - the most detailed yet into the phenomenon - concludes it is now claiming the lives of people who would never before have gone through with an attempt to commit suicide.
The study by a group of Hong Kong academics, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found she was the first person in the world recorded as taking her life by this method. Even the notorious 1993 Japanese suicide manual written by Wataru Tsurumi makes no mention of charcoal-burning.
Today, one in four people who kill themselves in Hong Kong do so by charcoal-burning, the second most common method after jumping from high buildings.
Elsewhere, in countries and territories around the region where the method has never before been recorded, people are killing themselves by charcoal-burning in increasing numbers.