A mobile phone lost three years ago in the remote wilderness of Xinjiang has resurfaced in Guangdong, after a passing hiker carried it home and managed to trace its owner through an attached residential access card.

The owner, a woman surnamed Qiu in Huizhou, Guangdong province, was surprised when she received a text from her property management asking if she had lost a phone in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. The following photo of a familiar device stunned her.

"I didn't think it could possibly be mine," Qiu said in an interview with China Central Television. "It had been lost for three years."

She had lost the device in July 2022, while trekking the Wusun Ancient Trail. She placed it on the rocks near Paradise Lake to film a close-up shot, but later couldn't find it.

"It was a vast beach of stones, and they all looked the same," Qiu said. "As I hadn't marked the spot and it was a no-man's land with no signal, we couldn't call the phone."

The phone remained there until this July, when a hiker surnamed Guo from Shenzhen stumbled upon it while trekking the same route. He carried the device back, but hit a dead end. The SIM card had long been deactivated, and his posts on social media seeking the owner went unanswered.

The breakthrough came in October, when Guo purchased a new property in Huizhou and searched the compound name on the access card. The complex was located just four kilometers from him.

He contacted the property management and soon received a call from the owner.

Qiu confirmed the device was hers. "It feels so unreal," she said. "For me, the phone is very important, and it has traveled through time and space."