But the snapshots she keeps in those rusty tins do not contain happy memories.

In her photographs, the children do not smile and some have lesions all over their thin bodies. The families pose not around a table for a birthday feast, but around a bed where a loved one is wasting away.

They are pictures of orphans, Aids sufferers and their grieving families she has visited, treated and consoled over the past decade.

Despite her age and failing eyesight, she is able to relate the fate of each person shown: 'This little one, his mother contracted Aids after getting a blood transfusion in the hospital and died leaving him to fend for himself.

'This brother and sister, both their parents died of Aids,' the Shandong native recounts in her thick, throaty accent as she sifts through the sheaves of glossy sheets.

From time to time, she looks up and exclaims in Mandarin: 'Hao ke lian (how pitiful they are)!'

Dr Gao Yaojie, 80, has been hailed as the champion of thousands of Aids victims in China. She has spoken out on their behalf when no one else dared to.

When she was in her late 60s, she was instrumental in shedding light on official complicity in the spread of Aids in central Henan province where she resides. In the 1990s, thousands of poor farmers there were infected with HIV, the virus that causes the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (Aids), in state-sanctioned blood-selling schemes.

This March, despite immense pressure from local Henan authorities to stay home, Dr Gao made her first visit overseas to the United States to receive an award honouring her contribution to the Aids cause in China.

Henan officials, afraid that the feisty grandmother of three would badmouth them, placed her under house arrest for 20 days in February, preventing her from travelling to Beijing to pick up a US visa.

They also threatened to cause so much trouble for her children - a son and two daughters - that her son, a 52-year-old university lecturer, knelt before her and begged her not to go.

Their strong-arm tactics sparked an international outcry. The foreign press and human rights groups that tracked Dr Gao's Aids work reported her plight, eventually prompting former first lady and US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to intervene.

Shortly after Senator Clinton - an honorary chairman of Vital Voices Global Partnership, the Washington-based non-profit women's advocacy group that gave Dr Gao the award - wrote to Chinese President Hu Jintao, Dr Gao was allowed to travel.

The diminutive doctor told The Sunday Times in a recent interview that she is still angry about being barred from leaving her apartment and receiving visitors.

Speaking from her modest, book-cluttered apartment in Zhengzhou city, the capital of central Henan province, she said: 'I didn't break any law or commit any crime. I don't know why they treated me that way.

'The worst was how they threatened my family,' she added, talking in rapid bursts and clenching her fists.

Surveillance was still tight when she first returned - her phone line was cut and guards stood outside her home - but has let up since then. Dr Gao said it was 'international pressure, and pressure from China's top leaders' that brought about the rare turnaround which enabled her to visit the US.

The controversy surrounding her case provides an insight into China's changing but somewhat ambivalent approach to dealing with Aids.

While government attitudes over the past 20 years - China reported its first Aids case in 1985 - have shifted from outright denial and cover-ups to acknowledgement and concern today, official tolerance for grassroots activism is still low.

Dr Gao has been barred twice before from leaving China to receive awards overseas - once in 2001 to accept an award from a United Nations group in Washington, and in 2003 for a public service award in the Philippines.

Local officials, afraid of unwanted attention, question the motives of Aids activists such as Dr Gao.

Official statistics say there are over 300,000 Aids victims in Henan, China's most populated province with 100 million people. China's health officials estimate 650,000 cases nationwide.

Officials claim the disease is most commonly transmitted through drug use and sexual contact.

Dr Gao says the real number is many times higher and maintains that Aids is chiefly spread through tainted blood transfusions and illegal blood sales.

Dr Sara L.M. Davis, executive director of New York-based NGO Asia Catalyst, which incubates new non-profit groups in China, said: 'The Chinese government has made a great deal of progress on dealing with Aids, but progress is not keeping pace with the epidemic.

'The epidemic is spreading faster than they can keep up.

'The local authorities are afraid of scaring off investors and getting into trouble, but benefits to confronting the disease openly are greater than the benefits of covering it up.'

Dr Gao's first encounter with an HIV patient was in 1996. A 42-year-old woman had been admitted to a Zhengzhou hospital with a fever, stomach tumours and black spots all over her body.

Puzzled by her symptoms, Dr Gao conducted tests for HIV even though other medical staff dismissed the possibility, saying that 'only foreigners contracted Aids'.

The tests showed that the woman, who was not a sex worker, had HIV. Retracing her patient's steps, Dr Gao discovered that she and other farmers had sold blood plasma at unsanitary commercial blood collection centres.

Old needles were used and the serum injected back into donors after the valuable plasma was separated from the red blood cells.

Donors were paid 50 yuan (S$10 at the current rate) each time. The blood centres made a profit and some local officials were involved.

Despite jeopardising her health and safety, Dr Gao spoke openly to the media about the problem in Henan.

Over the last decade, she has visited some 100 remote villages to distribute materials she wrote and printed with her own money to raise awareness on Aids prevention.

She has also sheltered Aids orphans and patients in her home, giving them clothes, food and money.

China outlawed blood sales 10 years ago after Henan's tainted blood trade came to light. It has also initiated medical research, a free drug programme and nationwide public awareness campaigns.

Authorities have also moved to clean up the country's blood collecting centres in recent years, but underground blood selling has persisted because of a lack of voluntary donations.

However, no senior official has been censured for the Henan blood scandal.

Now, plagued by old-age ailments, Dr Gao said she has cut down on travel and works from home.

In a spare bedroom, she stores bags of clothes to give away to the constant stream of Aids victims who come knocking on her door. It is also where she keeps a small altar in honour of her late husband, Dr Guo Mingjiu, who died last April at the age of 81.

Despite all that she has achieved, she is pessimistic about China's Aids situation.

'This is China's sorrow,' she said with a sigh. 'I feel down when I think about how so many people need help and how they are ostracised.'

She was amazed, she said, to see how differently Aids sufferers are treated in the US: 'There, ordinary people and Aids patients are fine together. In China, it is hard for people to shake off the discrimination.'

Asked what has kept her going all these years, she reached back into her past.

'I come from a good family, my grandfather was an imperial academician with the Qing Dynasty. We were steeped in the teachings of Confucius,' said Dr Gao, one of 12 children.

'Today, China's biggest problem is that people have lost their sense of propriety, righteousness, honesty and a sense of shame.'

Looking back, she said that she would change nothing.

'I regret nothing, because every person who comes into this world should do good deeds,' she said. 'If a person keeps doing bad deeds, he will not be forgiven.'

tracyq@sph.com.sg

GOING BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY

'Her biggest contribution is to publicise the situation in Henan, prompting the government to better address the Aids problem. Unlike other people who are in this line, she is the only one who helps Aids victims without thought of personal glory or gain. This is very admirable.'
MR ZHAO ZHEN, 37, founder of a non-governmental organisation in Henan aimed at helping HIV sufferers. He contracted HIV after selling blood up to 300 times between 1993 and 1994, earning about 50 yuan each time.

DIFFICULTY IN CHANGING MINDSETS

'This is China's sorrow...I feel down when I think about how so many people need help and how they are ostracised...(In the US), ordinary people and Aids patients are fine together. In China, it is hard for people to shake off the discrimination.'
DR GAO, on why she is pessimistic about China's Aids situation