Once renowned in China for their vagabond lifestyle mixing hedonism with grinding poverty, the Shenzhen tribe of marginalized workers known as the “Sanhe Dashen” appear to have been driven to extinction due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Sanhe Dashen were famed for spending 15 yuan (US$2.30) a day on food and a place to sleep — and maybe another 50 yuan to have their sexual needs met. They typically took temporary work that paid in cash at the end of each day, and with the average salary of 100 yuan, they lived by the motto, “work one day and play for three.”

The vagabonds were usually to be found in the city’s Longhua district, and typically hailed from rural families. Having turned down factory jobs, they worked as security guards, couriers and construction workers, lacking the education or skills for other types of employment.

They subsisted on cheap food, and spent the nights in internet cafes or shared quarters. Before the coronavirus, it was common to see the Sanhe Dashen roughing it on the streets.

A Hongkonger living in Shenzhen, surnamed Chow, told Apple Daily that the many factories in the Longhua district had made it a hotspot for out-of-town laborers. The district was home to the Shenzhen Sanhe Human Resources Market — the giant recruitment center after which the vagabonds were sarcastically named.

“There are some factory villages with very poor hygiene conditions, because hundreds of thousands of workers live there. Workers can have very low living expenses, so it was a crowded spot,” Chow said.

However, COVID-19 brought an end to the phenomenon. “Many factories are out of work, and Shenzhen had strict epidemic control policies for outsiders to be quarantined for 14 days. Many out-of-town laborers left and never came back,” Chow said.

A Weibo account corroborated Chow’s observation, saying that a site visit to the Sanhe Human Resources Market in late October revealed that most people had left.

In August, Sanhe Human Resources held a press conference denouncing the term “Sanhe Dashen,” saying that it was unfair to associate the vagabonds with the company.

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