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After breakfast, the radio played a song by Jay Chou in the clean and spacious Cihui Building inside the Guangzhou Home for the Elderly. An old man lay in a wheelchair, glaring at the ceiling and holding a microphone. He was humming a barely audible tune.

It was a regular day in October, as the staff at the home for the elderly strove to complete an almost impossible mission recovering the lost memories of people suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Opened last July, the Cihui Building is the country's first facility for Alzheimer's patients. For more than 100 elderly people, it has become a new home.

An hour after breakfast, nurses dressed in pink helped the elderly people gather in a circle.

"Today is Monday; it is 9 o'clock now and the weather outside is great," said one of the nurses. "Granny Liu, you are wearing a beautiful dress. Can you tell me what day is today?"

"Monday," the granny murmured.

"Granny, you have a wonderful memory! Here is a biscuit for you!"

The granny received the biscuit from the nurse and chewed it happily. Such scenes repeat many times everyday, in order to help the elderly people keep track of the passing time. The verbal encouragement and small treats are also helpful to keep the patients from slipping into their own lonely worlds.

After taking a nap at noon, the nurses gathered the patients for further treatments, which involve exciting their senses, training their hands and feet and awakening their memories.

With the nurses' help, two grannies and an old man were led into a dark room, where two projectors beamed colourful lights on the wall. During the game-like treatments, patients were encouraged to notice the changing and moving patterns and try to tell their names.

"This is quite effective for patients with medium and light cases of Alzheimer's, because the light and sound can excite their memory and imagination," said one of the nurses.

There are many names for the Cihui Building, such as Lianhualou (Lotus Mansion) and Changdi (Long Dike), which were names for old places that disappeared during the city's rapid development.

In a "nostalgia treatment" room, a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong, an old desk-sized sewing machine, embroidered shoes and folk opera costumes are on display.

"These are familiar items to the elderly people," said Hong Peixian, director of the Guangzhou Home for the Elderly. "We arranged them this way to help the elderly people recover their memories and stabilize their conditions."

All of the nurses here must be kind and caring, but they must also have another skill: being able to tell lies with good intentions occasionally and keeping the lies consistent. If they didn't, the elderly people will develop doubts and won't trust anyone.

Wu Suihua has been working at the elderly home for four years. She finds the patients who suffer from serious Alzheimer's are "like children that change temper unpredictably." When they are happy, they treat everyone nicely. But when they become irritated, they could say nasty things or even become violent.

According to Huang Shaokuan, deputy director of the home, there are some 930,000 people above the age of 60 in Guangzhou, and more than 5 per cent, or 45,000, of the population suffers from Alzheimer's.

(China Daily November 28, 2006)