A group of seven dogs that went missing in China have gone viral after a video emerged showing them walking more than 17 kms back home, reuniting with owners who had been searching for them for days.

A video, posted online on March 15, shows the dogs, including a golden retriever, Labrador, German shepherd and Pekinese, walking along a highway in Changchun, the capital of China’s north-east Jilin province, where temperatures drop below zero degree Celsius overnight, reports The Guardian.

A Corgi, later identified in Chinese media as "Dapang", or "big fatty", was seen leading the pack.

The footage reportedly went on to clock up more than 230 million views online.

A volunteer from a local stray dog rescue centre, Tong Tong, said she went door-to-door in nearby villages and distributed missing dog flyers after seeing the video, driven by concern for the animals in sub-zero conditions.

“On the morning of March 18 , I woke up to find it was snowing in Changchun. I was especially worried about the seven dogs, afraid that they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. So I borrowed a drone and set off to search for them,” Tong Tong said in a video posted by the rescue centre. On March 19, it was reported that the dogs had found their way home.

Three of the dogs, including Dapang, belong to a woman living in a village near Changchun. She told Chinese media she had been searching for her dogs for four days and was on the point of giving up when Dapang wandered back into the house on March 18. She then searched nearby villages and found the remaining dogs, which had been taken in by another villager.

It remains unclear why the dogs went missing. Some netizens suggested they may have been kidnapped for dog meat. Others speculated they could have been stolen for resale as pets or other purposes, or simply wandered off on their own.

On March 21, Jilin’s provincial culture and tourism bureau said the dogs had likely wandered off of their own, drawn by the German shepherd, who had previously been known to disappear for a few days at a time.

State media also warned that the incident “reflects the shortcomings of online information dissemination -- a mixture of true and false information, where subjective speculation is easily taken as fact and spread”.