"The strangest accusation was that the Chinese in Tuscany weren’t dying—or, at least, that they weren’t leaving any bodies behind"

"The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany"

In 1991, the regional government began an investigation into why, during the previous twelve months, not a single Chinese death had been officially recorded in Prato or in two nearby towns. In 2005, the government was still mystified—that year, more than a thousand Chinese arrivals were registered, and only three deaths. Locals suspected that Chinese mobsters were disposing of corpses in exchange for passports, which they then sold to new arrivals, a scheme that took advantage of the native population’s apparent inability to tell any one Chinese person from another.