Throughout China the one-child policy is dying out — but nowhere quite so fast as in Rudong, where it all began.

Rudong, on the eastern coast to the north of Shanghai, was one of the first counties to outlaw every baby after the firstborn, about a decade before the one-child policy took effect in most of China in 1979. Now it’s the first to face the consequences: a silver tsunami of old people.

All of China is ageing but Rudong is doing so faster: all those babies who were never born are not around now to look after all those parents who never bore them, so the population is heavily skewed to the elderly. And that has big implications for everything from old-age homes to local government financing to the mental health of the county’s pensioners.